Abstract

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, was a distinguished leader in British history and one of the greatest speakers of all time. It is his speeches, an embodiment of the whole British morale that made the British people unite together against the enemies and won the war. Churchill used many a modal verb to indicate the government’s determination to fight against evil and encourage the British people. This study establishes a mini corpus with four Churchill’s speeches. With the help of WordSmith software, the occurrence of modal verbs is calculated. According to Halliday’s (2000) framework of “Three values of modal verbs”, the modal verbs are identified as having three basic values: low, median and high. Based on the statistic results, the number of modal verbs committing to median value in the corpus totals up to 83, making up 65.35% of the whole. Besides, the modal verbs of high value and low value enumerate at 15 and 29 respectively, making up 11.81% and 22.84% respectively. The study mainly analyzes the interpersonal functions of modal verbs of different values and their influence on the speeches. In order to better understand Churchill’s resolution, the final part of this study discusses the E-C translation strategies of two frequently-occurring modal verbs: WILL and SHALL.

[Key words] Churchill’s speeches; modal verbs; interpersonal functions; English - Chinese translation strategies

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1. Introduction .1

2. Literature Review-2

2.1 Related theories-2

2.1.1 The theory of “Three values of modal verbs”-2

2.1.2 Interpersonal function in Systemic Functional Grammar-4

2.2 Related Studies-4

2.2.1 From the perspective of pragmatics-4

2.2.2 From the perspective of discourse analysis-4

3. Methodology 5

3.1 Research questions-5

3.2 Self-built corpus-5

3.3 Data collection-6

3.4 Data analysis-6

4. Study on Modal Verbs in Churchill’s speeches-6

4.1 The distribution features of modal verbs-7

4.1.1 The use of modal verbs-7

4.1.2 The distribution of modal verbs with different values-8

4.2 The interpersonal functions of modal verbs-9

4.2.1 The interpersonal functions of median value modal verbs-9

4.2.2 The interpersonal functions of low value modal verbs-11

4.2.3 The interpersonal functions of high value modal verbs-12

5. E-C Translation Strategies of Modal Verbs in Churchill’s Speeche.13

5.1 WILL-14

5.2 SHALL-15

5.3 Summary-16

6.Conclusion .16

References .18

Appendix .19