Abstract

As a reminiscent prose, The Sight of Father’s Back was written by the modern writer, Zhu Ziqing, in 1925. A wave of warm current floods a large body of readers since this essay describes, in earnest, love of father. This research performs a contrastive analysis of interpersonal function between the Chinese and English versions of The Sight of Father’s Back in terms of mood, modality, and evaluation meanings. We find that mood and evaluation meanings display parallel distribution. Declarative and exclamatory moods occur most frequently in both the Chinese and English versions, whereas interrogative mood is at a premium. Besides, various evaluative adjectives and adverbs are used in both versions. However, modality shows remarkable discrepancies. The English version tends to adopt modal verbs with median-and-low value, while most median-and-high value modal verbs are presented in the Chinese version. In our view, the exercise of median-and-high value modal verbs reflects the thoughts more directly. While the selection of median-and-low value modal verbs might be concerned with the need for politeness. Besides, diverse choices of modal verbs are incident to various modal meanings along with research purposes.

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