The Study on the Interpersonal Meanings of Modality in Micro-blogging English News Discourse - Donald Trump’s Muslim Entry Ban

Oct 15, 2026

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News discourse is treated as a valuable linguistic resource and examined through Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar. The study systematically analyzes modality type, value, and orientation to explain their interpersonal meanings in English micro-blogging news. Data are selected from microblogging official platforms, totaling 20 news discourse items from 2017-01-20 to 2017-02-20, all centered on “Donald Trump’s Muslim Entry Ban.” Both qualitative and quantitative methods map modality distribution and its interpersonal functions.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

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Pages9

Reading Time23 min

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Advances in Language and Literary Studies ISSN: 2203-4714 [www.alls.aiac.org.au](www.alls.aiac.org.au) | The Study on the Interpersonal Meanings of Modality in Micro-blogging English News Discourse by the case of“Donald Trump’s Muslim Entry Ban”
Zhai Rui, Liu Jingxia*
School of Foreign Languages, China Three Gorges University, 8 Daxue Road, Yichang City, 443002, Hubei Province, PR, China Corresponding Author: Liu Jingxia, E-mail: [clare04@126.com](clare04@126.com) | | | --- | --- | | ARTICLE INFO
Article history
Received: December 24, 2017
Accepted: March 05, 2018
Published: April 30, 2018
Volume: 9 Issue: 2
Advance access: March 2018
Conflicts of interest: None
Funding:This research is sponsored by | ABSTRACT
News is a kind of writing style, which is so valuable that many linguists choose it to study. This thesis aims to conduct a systemic analysis of modality type, value and orientation under the framework of Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar in order to explore the interpersonal meanings of modality in English news discourse. The research data is drawn from microblogging official platforms, among which 20 pieces of news discourse in all are selected to establish a small type of corpus. All the 20 pieces of news discourse are taken from the microblogging in 1.20 to 2.20 of 2017. All the news is about “Donald Trump’s Muslim Entry Ban”(A ban made by Donald Trump, which claimed that Muslim can’t enter America) . Meanwhile, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted to discover the distribution of modality in micro-blogging news discourse and its interpersonal meanings, and hence to deepen | | Research Fund for Excellent Dissertationpeople’s cognition and understanding on micro-blogging news discourse. Through a detailed | | | of China Three Gorges University" under this Fund Number: 2018SSPY155 .
Key words:
Micro-blogging English News Discourse,
Modality,
Interpersonal Meaning,
Systemic-functional Grammar,“Donald Trump’s Muslim Entry Ban | analysis, the study has a lot of findings. We found that modality language is widely used in micro-blogging news. From the perspective of modality type, reporters prefer to use finite modal adjunct such as will in the type of modulation to show their emotional attitude of the target thing. From the perspective of modality value, we can see that median value is the most popular among three values for reporters, and “will” and “would” are the most popular expressions that express the speaker’s expectations, willingness and determination or the reporter’s views, attitudes on the possibility of a certain event. Meanwhile, from the perspective of modality orientation, the speaker or writer tends to use implicit objective orientation in order to show objectiveness of the news discourse and get rid of writers’ responsibilities. This paper attempts to analyze modality in micro-blogging English news discourse from the perspective of interpersonal functions which aims to provide a new method for discourse analysis and acts as a beneficial complementary to modality language analysis. | INTRODUCTION With the developing of the internet technology, the communication distance and velocity among people all over the world have been greatly optimized. Traditionally, we have newspaper, television news and broadcasting news. But now, we have our micro-blogging news (also named Twitter in foreign countries), the role of news on internet would become more and more important in ordinary life. For the sake of record and analyze the changes of human language, we choose micro-blogging news as the research target, which should be very convenient to analyze, since it is highly restricted with rules. For the sake of reader’s understanding of the change and influence of micro-blogging news, a detailed explanation will be carried out with guidance of Systemic-functional Grammar. The theory was proposed by Halliday(1994) who defined the meta

FAQs

What is the main research goal of the thesis?

To conduct a systemic analysis of modality type, value, and orientation in English micro-blogging news discourse and explore their interpersonal meanings.

What data and time range does the research use?

The study uses 20 selected news discourse items from microblogging official platforms, taken from January 20 to February 20 of 2017.

How is modality analyzed in relation to interpersonal meaning?

It examines modality from three perspectives—type, value, and orientation—to identify reporters’ language choices, expectations and attitudes, and the way implicit objective orientation supports perceived objectiveness.

Oct 15, 2026

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