Contrastive Analysis of Modality in English and Chinese--新.docVIP

Contrastive Analysis of Modality in English and Chinese -------within the two main linguistic expressions In Functional Grammar, Halliday (Hu Zhuanglin, 1989:11-12) employs three kinds of meanings to explore how meanings are created and understood. The three kinds of meanings are labeled by Halliday as ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. Language serves to establish and maintain social relations: for the expression of social roles, which include the communication roles created by language itself-for example the role of questioner or respondent, which we take on by asking or answering a question; and also for getting things done, by means of the interaction between one person and another (Halliday, 1970: 143). This is how interpersonal meaning is defined in systemic functional grammar. This metafunction can be perceived from two aspects: mood and modality in lexical and grammatical level and key in phonological level. Modality concerns all the aspects of discourse that relate to the emotional or critical attitude or evaluation of the discourse by speakers and audiences. And nearly all the messages choose some degree of modality. 1 The Definition of Modality The study of modality has long been a major focus of interest for logicians, philosophers and linguists. However, when it comes to the definition of modality, things go perplexing. A lot of linguists approach the notion of modality from different perspectives. However, in this paper, modality will be discussed in the framework of systemic functional grammar. As Halliday (2000: 356) defines, “Modality refers to the area of meaning that lies between yes and no—the intermediate ground between positive and negative”. In the scope of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, there is a distinction between proposition and proposal. What participants exchange may be either information or goods and services. In the statements and questions, information is either given or asked, in which kind of