Unraveling image construction by modality: Corpus-based diachronic insights into the reports to the Party Congress of China.

Recent years have witnessed a "discursive turn" in image construction studies. This article explores the linguistic features of image construction. We provide a corpus-based diachronic study of the distribution of modality in The Reports to the 16th to 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and unravel the role of the modal verbs in conceptualizing China's images in The Reports.