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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Modality Research Abroad and at Home
Modality is initially a critical grammatical category of human language. Recently,linguists and some scholars made comprehensive analysis of English modal verbs fromphilosophy, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. With the development oflinguistics, modality aroused intense interest among linguists at home and abroad, thusvarious theories on modality come into being. Researchers apply different methods toanalyze the modality from multiple perspectives. This section is made to conclude aliterature review on research at home and abroad. In traditional grammar, modality is understood as significant realization of modal verbs.Grammarians treat modality and modal verbs equally. Aristotle is the first person whoexpresses his idea on modality and focuses on the modal logic. Perkins (1983) elaborates theforms of expression of English modal meaning.Modality has become one of the most vibrant areas of linguistic studies in the pastdecades, as linguists have come to recognize its importance for language and communication.Human beings constantly imagine things that are not real but still possible or even contraryto facts. They continually evaluate the reality status of states-of-affairs, or urge or allowinterlocutors to bring about states-of-afFairs not present in reality. Of the types of modalexpressions in English, modal verbs are the one which has received most attention amongresearchers (Palmer, 2001). Modal auxiliaries or modal verbs indicate attitudes of thespeaker/writer towards the state or event expressed by another verb (Richards et al., 2000).
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2.2 English Writing Research Abroad and at Home
In the past ten years, there are some aspects studied by some researchers, which are theinfluence from students’ mother language, the contextual and linguistic features of secondlanguage writing, the factors which influence the quality of second language writing and theteaching and assessment of second language writing. It is the hot topic in the process ofsecond language acquisition. Cumming (1989) examines the writing expertise and languageproficiency's influence on the second language writing and reveals that the qualities ofwritten texts are influenced by different factors such as the qualities of discourseorganization and content in the compositions as well as the attention to complex aspects ofwriting. Different cognitive demands are required by different kinds of writing tasks.Kirkpatrick (1997) taking the ESL writing of Chinese mainland students as the subject findssome features of Chinese mainland students when they compose writings in Chinese.McEnery and Kifle (2002: 188) studies the argumentation writing corpus of the Englishlearners. And in the research, they find that these students are inclined to use modal verbs inwriting in order to express the modality, especially the euphemistic modal verbs. WangWenyu and Wen Qiufang (2003) did the similar research about the influence of ways ofthinking of mother language on English writings according to research of compositions ofEnglish majors in China, Similarly, they recorded the students' thinking process when theycompose their English writings. Wu Jing (2003) analyzes the structural features of theargumentative writings composed by 68 college students and fi本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。