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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the Research
The study of modality has a long history of more than two thousand years, which can dateback to ancient Greek philosophy, and then to logic and to modern linguistics. Due to the factthat modality is widely known as one of the important semantic carriers for interpersonalfunction, the study on interpersonal meanings expressed by modality has drawn manyscholars’ attention such as Huang Guowen and Li Zhanzi. Therefore, there appear a lot ofstudies about how modality expresses interpersonal meanings in various types of discoursebased on Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar. Later on, modality is further divided intoepistemic modality and deontic modality by Lyons (1977). Although deontic modality doesn’tget so much attention as epistemic modality in the past decades, there are still few studies onit. Yet the few existing studies on deontic modality are merely about its interpersonal functionin a certain kind of discourse rather than the different degrees of its modal meanings invarious kinds of discourse. Therefore, in order to fill in this gap, the present thesis intends toconduct a study on the expressivity of deontic modality based on the two types of Englishdiscourse, that is, political speeches and business English. Besides, the reason why this paperchooses political speeches and business English as the research materials is that these twotypes of discourse are the most commonly and frequently used as the object materials inprevious studies about the interpersonal function of deontic modality. The present thesisattempts to study deontic modality in the same typical discourse only from a differentperspective.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Thesis
The purpose and significance of the thesis can be learned from the following four aspects.The first is to table out the distributions and occurrence frequencies of main modalexpressions of deontic modality, that is, finite modal operators and expansions of thepredicator, along with their modality value and modal orientation allocation in the fortypieces of discourse.The second is to define the expressivity of deontic modality and mainly illustrate the scales ofmodal meanings including modal responsibility (obligation) and modal commitment(inclination) expressed by deontic modality in political speeches and business Englishdiscourse through analyzing its embodiments, that is, modality values and modal orientations.The third is to display to what extent the deontic modality expressivity is similar to ordifferent from each other between the selected two types of discourse and try to table out thereasons for that.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Related Concepts of Deontic Modality
In the framework of Systemic-Functional Grammar, modality expressions have beenexpanded from modal operators in traditional grammar to a broader scope. To be morespecific, Halliday (2000) believes that there are four methods in total to convey modality:finite modal operators, modality metaphors, modal adjuncts and expansion of the predicators.And according to Thompson (2008), who once made a further classification of modality todistinguish positive modality from negative modality as well as neutral modality whichmeans that there is no modality in the statement, deontic modality as one of the majormodalities is positiv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。