The Contrastive Study Of Modality Orientation In Commencement Addresses By American And Chinese University Presidents

University president’s commencement address is the last class for graduates before leaving school.Presidents can express their encouragement,advice and expectations in the form of a commencement address.In recent years,articles about Chinese and American university president’s commencement address are piling up.Most of these articles studied the commencement address from theme,the use of words,speech trend,form and connotation.The research studied from the perspective of modality orientation is rare.What’s more,the existing researches concerning modality orientation mainly appear in the researches of the overall framework of Systematic Functional Linguistics(SFL).Therefore,based on Halliday’s modality orientation system in SFL,the study chooses 9 Chinese addresses and 9 American addresses as the research materials.By using Ant Conc to count the modal expressions,this study makes a contrastive analysis of the detailed distributions of modal expressions in selected materials and finds the use of modality orientations in both sides.Through the contrastive analysis,it is found in this study that:(1)In English addresses,explicit subjective orientation,realized by prepositional phrase(a),modal lexical verb and projecting clause(a),accounts for 12.34% of the total modal expressions.Implicit subjective orientation,realized by comment adjunct and modal auxiliary verb,accounts for 29.88%.Explicit objective orientation,realized by nominal modal expression,prepositional phrase(b)and projecting clause(b),accounts for 19.40%.Implicit objective orientation,realized by mood adjunct and passive verb,accounts for 38.38%.In the Chinese addresses,explicit subjective orientation accounts for 6.97%.Implicit subjective orientation accounts for 18.83%.Explicit subjective orientation accounts for 11.51%.Implicit objective orientation accounts for 62.69%.(2)Both Chinese and American university presidents’ commencement addresses tend to use implicit objective orientation.(3)The orientations in both Chinese and English addresses are realized mainly through mood adjuncts and modal auxiliary verbs.However,Chinese presidents(62.69%)use more mood adjuncts than American presidents(37.45%)to express the implicit objective orientation.This thesis studies the use of modality orientations in Chinese and American university presidents’ commencement addresses,and provides a new angle for the study of commencement address.The author hopes that this study can enrich the study of modality orientation and promote the readers’ understanding of university president’s commencement address from the perspective of modality orientation.At the same time,it can help many English learners in China to learn and use modal expressions.