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1、A Contrast Study between Chinese English Learners and Native-speakers on the Use of Modal Verbs in Written Form Based on CorpusAbstract: This paper aims at exploring the differences between Chinese English learners around the author and native-speakers on the use of modal verbs. The corpus consists
2、of 80 compositions of Chinese English learners and 16 long compositions of the native-speakers. The research shows that Chinese English learners are more inclined to use modals than native speakers. Secondly, Chinese English learners have overused primary modal verbs like can and will and underused
3、secondary modal verbs such as could and would. Whats more, Chinese English learners tend to use active voice after modals while in many situations native-speakers tend to use passive voice. These results offer us pedagogical implications in teaching modal verbs.Keywords: contrastive interlanguage an
4、alysis; modal verbs; corpus-based1. IntroductionIn the last 30 years, modal verbs have been a heated topic in linguistic circle. Modality has also been studied by many linguistic scholars from different angles. By now, it is very common to use a corpus to investigate lexical items in terms of their
5、collocations and other types of patterning, and to argue that learners need to be aware of this aspect of vocabulary if they are to use language appropriately. (Carter and McCarthy, 1988)Many researchers have made investigation on the use of modal sequences and they studied it in different angles am
6、ong different kinds of students. For instance, Liangmaocheng have studied the modal sequences through dividing modality into deontic modality and epistemic modality. He made comparison between Chinese English learners who are non-English majors and native speakers. Meanwhile, in some masters thesis,
7、 they make research on the difference between English majors and native-speakers. This paper is based on a corpus which is close to the author and intends to test whether some consensus applies to students around the author or not. This paper will explore such questions as:1. Whether Chinese learner
8、s around the author have the common problem of overuse some of the modal verbs and underuse some of them?2. If so, what are the modal verbs that have been overused and what are the modal verbs that have been underused? 3. Besides, in what kind of situations do Chinese English learners around the aut
9、hor tend to overuse the particular modal verbs? 2.Literature ReviewWhat have done in this field is quite important for my study. In recent 30 years, corpus is becoming more and more popular in linguistic study. It offers researchers new method of doing research, an empirical one and is appealing to
10、more and more researchers. Researchers have employed it in the modality study.2.1 Corpus LinguisticsCorpus linguistics can best be defined as a linguistic methodology which is founded on the use of electronic collections of naturally occurring texts, viz. corpora. It is neither a new branch of lingu
11、istics nor a new theory of language, but the very nature of the evidence it uses makes it a particularly powerful methodology, one which has the potential to change perspectives on language. For Leech it is a “new” research enterprise, a new philosophical approach to the subject, an “open sesame” to
12、 a new way of thinking about language”.(Leech,1992) The power of computer software tools combined with the impressive amount and diversity of the language data used as evidence has revealed and will continue to reveal previously unsuspected linguistic phenomena. For Stubbs “the heuristic power of co
13、rpus methods is no longer in doubt”. (Stubbs, 1996:234) Corpus linguistics has contributed to the discovery of new facts which have led to far-reaching new hypotheses about language. Much of recent work in applied linguistics is built upon the findings of the theoretical research to make concrete re
14、commendations concerning language-related practice in real-world domains. If the theoretical research lacks an adequate empirical basis, application of the research is correspondingly flawed. An alternative approach is to study directly the patterns of language structure and use as they are in real-
15、world domains, so the applied recommendations are based on a solid empirical foundation. Corpus-based analyses are particularly for purposes of this kind.2.2The Main Concern of Previous Study on ModalsThere have been a lot of studies on the modals from different angles: in terms of speech acts (Boyd
16、&Thome, 1969:57-74), in terms of systemic grammar (Bybee etal., 1995), in terms of feature analysis (Marino, 1973:309-323) and of stratification grammar (Johannessen, 1976). The main defect of these many varied approaches has been their reliance on the analysts intuition. (Coates, 1983) After that, there have been a number of corpus studies of modal auxiliaries (e.g. Coates 1983; Biber et al.1999:483-497; Kennedy 2002:73-90; Tagliamonte: 2004) and of modal auxi
