A Comparative Analysis Of Obligation Modality In English Research Articles Written By Native Scholars And Chinese Scholars

Academic paper is a way for scholars to transmit academic information and share their research results.The process of globalization is an important driving force to promote the writing of English academic paper.Obligation modality is a subsystem of modality system,which is usually expressed as the obligation required by the other party in command.The accuracy in obligation modality not only reflects the writer’s understanding of the characteristics and functions of academic papers,but also helps the author complete the task of transmitting academic information.Therefore,this study investigated the 80 English academic discourses in applied linguistics written by native scholars and Chinese scholar as the corpus,with the interpersonal function of halliday’s systemic functional grammar as the theoretical basis,through the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis,finding out the obligation modal verbs and obligation modality orientation in two types of academic paper proportion in the total number of words.A comparative analysis is made on the level of obligation modality values and obligation modality orientation,and the results show that:First,the total amount of obligation modality verbs used by Chinese scholars is slightly higher than that of native scholars,and "should" is the most used in the two groups of corpora.Second,native scholars use more "must" than Chinese scholars and often use the passive voice of modal verbs.Third,"have to" and "need to" both appear in both Chinese and native writings."have to" is slightly higher in Chinese scholars’ writings but "need to" is slightly higher in native scholars’ writings."be supposed to","be allowed to","be required to" are equal in quantity in the two kinds of writings.In the obligation modality orientation,first,the total usage of obligation modality orientation by Chinese scholars is higher than that by native scholars.Second,the usage of explicit subjective and explicit objective orientation by native scholars is higher than that by Chinese scholars.However,the usage of implicit subjective and implicit objective orientation by Chinese scholars is higher than that by native scholars.As we can see,in obligation modality,Chinese scholars have their own usage characteristics.The thesis makes a contrastive analysis of the similarities and differences in the using characteristics of the obligation modality verbs and the obligation modality orientation,which will provide some insights for Chinese scholars.