A Multifactorial Analysis Of The Use Of Modal Verbs Can,May And Could In Chinese EFL Learners’ Essays

Modal verbs,as a crucial means of construing modality,pose major challenges for English learners,which has drawn extensive attention in the realm of second language acquisition.Among them,can,may and could are typical and core synonymous modal verbs.To date,however,previous research on the acquisition of English modal verbs has been limited to simple frequency comparison,and thus the resulted overuse and underuse,ignoring the multifactorial nature of contextual meaning-making process.Moreover,little research has dealt with synonymous modal verbs by Chinese EFL learners using the multifactorial approach.Given this,4982 exemplars of the targeted modals were retrieved from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English(ICNALE)and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS),and were manually annotated.Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis with Regressions(Mu PDAR)was conducted to explore the factors that contribute to Chinese EFL learners’ deviation from native speakers when using can,may and could.Then the extent to which the three modals differ under each significant factor was compared.The results showed that subject morphology and mean word length were the significant factors that contribute to the deviation of Chinese English learners from native speakers in using the modal verbs can,may and could;negation,senses,verb semantics,and subject animacy were shown to have a substantial impact on the deviation of both can and may;subject number and mean sentence length were found to have a considerable impact on the deviation of both can and could.By comparison,in terms of each significant factor,the deviations of the three modal verbs differed,but the use of could by Chinese learners diverged more strikingly from that of native speakers.Following the usage-based Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization model(EC-Model),the reasons for the deviation of Chinese English learners may be ascribed to frequency,first language transfer,differential prototypicality,and insufficient learned attention.Overall,due to varied patterns of multifactorial contextual co-selection,each modal verb is subject to differential entrenchment.This study provides useful insights for the acquisition and teaching of English synonymous modal verbs.