A vast amount of research has now established that writer-reader interaction is embodied in written texts through various linguistic devices. Among them, modalization plays a key role as a strategy for constructing the interaction in text. The impetus for this study is that it allows a new perspective to cross-cultural comparison between English and Korean texts. Based on contextual analysis of 356 British and Korean newspaper science popularizations with the two pairs of analytical categories that show how directly the writer performs the interaction with the reader (Types DI and II) and how strongly the writer commits him/herself to propositions (Types S and W), this paper argues that the discoursal preferences in the interactive use of modalization by the two groups of authors seem to be a reflection of the different orientations to human relations in British and Korean societies: equality-orientation in Britain and hierarchy-orientation in Korea.

Abstract
  Ⅰ. Introduction
  Ⅱ. The Study
  Ⅲ. The Corpora and Analysis
  Ⅳ. Results and Discussions
  Ⅴ. Conclusion
  References

• Chul-Kyu Kim(Kyung Hee University)