Thesis (M.A.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

Modality is the area which lies between the two poles of 'yes' and 'no', a system known as Polarity, by which a speaker's judgment is identified and brought to light. This research attempts to locate two natural science textbooks on a continuum of Probability to determine how much the writers are Certain/Uncertain of their arguments and to detect variation of occurrence and frequency of Epistemic Modality in the two texts. Two highly related natural science books are chosen as corpus: Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which adopts the views of Darwin's Evolution theory in his The Origin of Species; and John C. Sanford's Genetic Entropy which debates against and refutes Dawkins' views. The main framework of analysis is Michael Halliday's concept of Modality, along with other views, and Halliday's subcategories of modal typology into Proposition and Proposal with the main focus being directed towards the category of Probability or Epistemic Modality. Statistical valuesare given to the entire processes in the two analyzed texts: epistemicallymodalized clauses are compared to the total number of clauses, as well as to the Modulated clauses. Other Modality factors of Value and Orientationare examined. The two writers differed in the use of their modalized language in terms of Value and Orientation. The analysis also demonstrated the significance of Modality, Hedging, and Evidentiality in natural science texts

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