David Crystal & Derek Davy studies some certain aspects of language variation from the perspective of general stylistics and summarizes the stylistic features of the news report discourses in Investigating English Style. An analytical framework with a linguistic approach for examinations of stylistic features such as vocabulary, syntax and semantics was also put forward. Their works made a great contribution to the news study.

Zhang Liaoliao (2011) revealed the bias and ideology underlying a VOA news report US Lawmakers, Activists Press China to Improve Human Rights by analyzing its classification system, transitivity system, and modality system. Zhang Sijun (2012) unveiled the bias of China by analyzing about 20 news reports on “selling weapon on Taiwan” from the aspects of lexical classification, transitivity, and modality. Three methods, i.e. van Dijk’s Socio-Cognitive Approach, Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach and Halliday’s Systematic-Functional Grammar, are used to discuss how China’s image is discursively constructed in New York Times (Ma, 2012).

The type of analysis of news reports can also be categorized into the analysis of monolingual texts and the contrastive analysis of bilingual texts. Cheng Xin (2007) focused on analyzing the English news reports in VOA to show how VOA constructed a distorted image of China. Chen Qianling (2012) tried to dig out the attitude of the American media by comparing the news reports on the same event. Zhan Lifeng (2012) unveiled that the attitude of New York Times towards China is negative and hostile by comparing its news reports on Arms Sales to Taiwan with news reports in China Daily. 

1.1.2 Studies on modality 

In daily life language is used to is “to enact social relations between addressers and addressees, to express the speaker’s viewpoint on events and things in the world, and to influence the addressee’s behavior or views”, which is called the interpersonal function (Chapman & Routledge, 2009). It is realized by mood and modality. Modality, the key element of interpersonal function attracts lots of attention from researchers in China and abroad. The study of modality has long been a major focus of interest for logicians, philosophers and linguists and it also can be traced back to the time of Aristotle, more than 2000 years ago.

Aristotle clarifies the interrelationship between the notions of possibility and necessity, and expresses “the equal status in conjunction with negative operators in his De Interpretation” (Xu, 2008). The main focuses of his discussion are the notions of necessity, possibility and impossibility, which provide the basis of modal logic. A small set of items known as the modal verbs (can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, must and perhaps, ought (to) and need) are the focuses of many post-Aristotle studies on modality.

Bybee et al. (1994) proposes a four-way pision: agent-oriented modality (roughly deontic), speaker-oriented modality (illocutionary, especially permissives and imperatives), epistemic modality (possibility) and subordinating modality (subjunctive and other markers related with purposive and concessive clauses, etc). Agent-oriented modality includes all modal meanings that predicate conditions on an agent with regard to the completion of an action referred to by the main predicate, e.g. obligations, desire, etc.

Palmer makes a thorough analysis of English modality and modal verbs in Modality and the English Modals. In Mood and Modality, three closely related typological patterns: modality, tense and aspect (TAM) are discussed (Palmer, 1986). M stands for modality instead of mood. Mood is the subsystem of modality. Modality is mainly classified into two categories which are propositional modality and event modality (Palmer, 2007). The former one is related to the speaker’s estimation to the truth of the proposition. The latter one is concerned with events which are not actualized or have not happened. These two main categories can be further pided into epistemic modality, evidential modality, deontic modality and dynamic modality. Epistemic modality has to do with the degree of speaker commitment to the truth of the proposition that forms the complement of the modality. Evidential modality provides with the sources of information that the speaker relies on in order to make the assertion. Deontic modality is concerned with the necessity or possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents, e.g. obligation and permission. A roughly equivalent term of “epistemic” is “root”. Dynamic modality expresses the ability or inability to realize the assertion regardless of the will of the speaker.