AN INVESTIGATION INTO LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF MODALITY MARKERS USED BY TEACHERS IN LECTURES IN ENGLISH

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the lexical devices expressing modality meaning in lectures in English. Drawing on the corpus from extracted lectures, mainly from 400 Toefl IBT materials, Ielts and from video on the internet, some linguistic features of modality marker are identified under syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspect. This qualitative study was based on a descriptive framework of grammatical function, epistemic modality, deontic modality, speech act and politeness theory. A wide range of lexical devices denoting modal meaning were found in the corpus of extracted lectures. These modality markers were discovered to express the teacher's attitude, opinion and also the imposition through the content of lectures in view of epistemic and deontic modality. They can be regarded as a tool to enable the teachers to modulate their attitude towards the content as well the hearers of the utterances. These findings will enable the learners of English to get a better understanding of intended usage of modality markers in lectures by teachers. The thesis also suggests some implications for English teaching and learning process.