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2.1 A review on modality in different fields
Since the studies on modality all have their own research significances and focuson different areas, which may include traditional and transformational-generativegrammar approach, semantic approach, pragmatic approach and systemic functionalapproach, the heated debate on the concept and classification of modality still does notcome to an agreement to many philosophers, logician and linguists both in China andabroad.From the perspective of the origin of modality, Aristotle mainly focused on thenotion of possibility, necessity and impossibility. Though he made studies on therelations between the three notions and drew the inspiration for the later studies, theresearch itself limited to the philosophical area.From a cognitive perspective, Sweester (2002) pointed out that modality refers toa special vocabulary area displaying the synchronic ambiguity between the internal andexternal world, which extends the concept from the domain of real world to the speechacts and from the sociophysical domain to epistemic domain.In traditional and transformational-generative grammatical approach, modality isconsidered as the meaning expressed by a series of modal auxiliaries. Scholars focus onthe syntactical and lexical levels. From the former level, linguists from traditionalgrammar discuss the morphology of the modal auxiliaries in interrogative sentence,affirmative sentence and negative sentence. As to lexical level, modality is realized inmeaning, which can be proved in the categories of modality, including possibility,necessity and willingness.
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2.2 Previous studies on modality in systemic functional grammar
The basic function of language is to describe the world knowledge and adjustgood human relations. While standing in the sea of infinity, each individual cannotalways acquire a full understanding about everything. So, people are tending to expressthemselves clearly without definitely affirmative information to allow for theunforeseen circumstances. That is to say, when people are communicating with eachother, they give and receive their attitudes and feelings, but sometimes, a euphemisticway to keep sound relationship among them.In systemic functional grammar, there are two parts involved: systemic grammarand functional grammar, which together consist Halliday’s theory. Language is anetwork of interrelated and multi-layered systems of options in meaning ( Halliday &Matthiessen, 2004:24). The semantic stratum is significant for socio-linguistic contextwhile there are three elements including the ideational, the interpersonal and the texualin it.In Halliday’s modality system, modality together with mood is the importantsubsystem in Interpersonal Function. There are two broad categories: modalization andmodulation. The former refers to a proposition where the meaning of the positive andnegative poles is asserting and denying (Halliday, 2000:89), while the latter stands for aproposal where the meaning of the positive and negative poles is prescribing andproscribing. To be more exact, modalization contains the expressions of probability andusuality, whereas modulation concludes obligation and inclination. Thompson alsostressed the necessity for scholars to pay attention to modality because it can beinstrumental to analyze the discourse analysis.
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