Metaphors Of Modality Essay

4.4 Interpersonal Meanings Conveyed by Metaphors of Modality As a first person who has formally proclaimed the existence and significance of grammatical metaphor, Halliday makes it clear that metaphors can reveal interpersonal meanings. Metaphors of modality, a particular type of grammatical metaphor, is another linguistic realization of modality. According to orientation of modality, metaphors of modality can be divided into explicitly subjective, explicitly objective, implicitly subjective and implicitly objective. Martin et al. (2010: 69) create a table to show that modal operators are implicitly subjective; modal adjuncts and predicators are implicitly objective. Since modal operators, modal adjuncts and predicators have already covered, the writer would like to discuss only explicitly subjective metaphors and explicitly objective metaphors in this part.
4.4.1 Explicitly Subjective Modality Explicitly Subjective

Studies of SFG are sometimes applied to discourse analysis and political discourse can be interpreted from the perspective of rhetoric, appraisal theory, Faircough’s three-dimensional theory, functional theory and SFG. This thesis takes three texts of 2016 U.S. presidential debates as a corpus to investigate the interpersonal meanings conveyed by modality system under the theoretical framework of SFG initiated by Halliday. Modality as a grammatical concept and a realization of interpersonal meanings plays an important role in 2016 U.S. presidential debates. The thesis firstly introduces the three variables of modality, including type, value and orientation. Then, the writer finds out the numbers and frequencies of four different linguistic realizations (modal operators, modal adjuncts, the expansion of predicator and metaphors of modality) of modality in the three debates. Major findings based on collected data are listed as