ABSTRACT

As two major countries in the world, China and the United States have attracted much attention, especially in politics. Moreover, modal verb is a complex concept in linguistics, and it has a variety of meanings and functions. By building two self-directed Corpora of English version of Chinese Government Work Reports and State of the Union Address from 2012 to 2016, this paper will make a comparative study of modal verbs use in these two political documents from the perspective of frequency, modal meaning and interpersonal function. Results indicates that in these two documents, will, need, should, must, and can have higher frequency, while shall, ought to, dare and dared did not appear, whereas will almost serves as future tense instead of modal verbs and need mainly serves as noun and main verbs. With regard to the modal value, median value modal verbs are most frequently utilized; nevertheless, the frequency of low value modal verbs in State of the Union Address is much higher than that of the English version of Chinese Government Work Reports. Besides, the modal meaning in State of the Union Address is more abundant. Through this study, a preliminary exploration of the use of modal verbs in Chinese and American political discourse will be conducted, which is of realistic significance and of great value.

Key Words：Chinese Government Work Reports  State of the Union Address  modal verb  comparative study

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

ABSTRACT

中文摘要

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION-1

 1.1 RESEARCH BACKGROUND-1

 1.2 PURPOSE AND SIGNIFICANCE-1

 1.3 THE STRUCTURE OF THE PAPER-1

CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW-3

  2.1 STUDIES ON THE ENGLISH VERSION OF CHINESE GOVERNMENT WORK

 REPORT-3

 2.2 STUDIES ON THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS-4

2.3 THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE CHINA’S GOVERNMENT WORK REPORT 

AND THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS-4

 2.4 STUDIES ON THE MODAL VERBS-5

2.4.1 Linguistic Studies on Modal Verbs-5

2.4.2 Studies on Modal Verbs in Political Discourse-6

 2.5 SUMMARY-7

CHAPTER THREE A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MODAL VERBS IN CGWR AND SUA-8

 3.1 RESEARCH SUBJECT AND DATA COLLECTION-8

 3.2 RESEARCH METHODS-8

 3.3 RESULTS AND ANALYSIS-8

3.3.1 The Frequency of Modal Verbs in CGWR and SUA-8

3.3.2 The Use of Modal Verbs with Different Modal Values in CGWR and SUA-10

3.3.3 The Modal Meaning-11

 3.4 SUMMARY-16

CHAPTER FOUR CONCLUSION-17

 4.1 SUMMARY-17

 4.2 LIMITATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS-18

BIBLIOGRAPHY-19

APPENDIX-21