A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Modal Verbs CAN And Neng Based On Grammaticalization

This paper aims to make a comparative study of the English and Chinese modal verbs can and neng from the perspective of grammaticalization. Researches on modal verbs have been done from different angles, but there is still vast space that is worth exploring. Traditional comparative researchers make endless synchronic descriptions of English and Chinese modal verbs can and neng in order to find common and different properties of human language. They emphasize the static descriptions without taking the dynamic change of language into consideration. Thus none of the study can satisfactorily explain what the relationship between different senses of a modal verb is and why the two modal verbs have some similarities. Therefore, it attests the continuing need for new perspectives into the investigation and analysis of modal verbs. The intention of this thesis is not only to look into the evolutionary similarities and differences in the grammaticalization of these two modal verbs but also to locate the motivations arid deep mechanisms behind their semantic changes. This study compensates the gap of previous studies.Under this theoretical framework of grammaticalization, this paper collects authentic materials from Corpus only to analyze the paths, the mechanisms, the evolutionary similarities and differences of English and Chinese modal verbs can and neng in a diachronic process.Based on the investigations, we can unveil many evolutionary similarities in the mechanisms of these two languages which help us master the semantic properties of them as well. For the reason that it derives from common cognitive competence of human beings, mechanisms of grammaticalization are supposed to provide a valuable clue to the further study of linguistic universals.