Abstract:

Most linguistic studies have focused on modal verbs, modal adverbs, or modal nouns separately, but little attention has been paid to the co-occurrence of modal devices. This paper proposes a new term “modal satellite adverbs” (MSAs), i.e. the co-occurrence of modal verbs and some adverbs, and studies their semantic types, distributions, and functions of modality supplementing in four genres, namely, academic writings, public speeches, journalistic interviews, and law and regulations. The discourse functions and interpersonal functions that MSAs perform are referred to as modality supplementing.
Based mainly on the Systemic Functional Linguistic approach to interpersonal metafunction as well as authentic corpora, this paper shows that MSAs can perform the discourse functions of value adaptation, modal synergy and generic prominence. Also, it indicates that such interpersonal meanings as solidarity, deference and hierarchy are displayed differently in the four genres. This project is an extension of Systemic Functional Linguistic studies on interpersonal metafunction.

Author: Tangjin Xiao