A Cognitive Study On English Modals

Modality has been a heated topic for philosophers, logicians and linguists. Especially, linguists have done many researches on it from different aspects and have achieved a lot. Treated as auxiliary verbs, modality is mainly studied in respects of syntactic role and meaning in a sentence in traditional grammar. It is thought in systematic-functional grammar that modality is an important part of interpersonal function and it expresses language users' estimation or uncertainty about the understanding of something. Semanticists concentrate their researches on deontic and epistemic modality. At the same time, most researchers pay more attention to the present-tense modals.The complication of modality semantics remains a nodus for researchers who hold different views on it. There are monosemy, homonymy, and polysemy views on the sense relation of English modals. With the development of cognitive linguistics, more and more researches have realized the polysemantic relations between different meanings of English modals. Through the analysis of a questionnaire given to 156 students, the author finds that students mostly hold the view that modals possess the polysemantic relations, but most of them think the meanings of a modal are separated and unrelated. So, the thesis tries to analyze the modals and their past-tense forms of natural language with the image schema and metaphorical mapping theories. She finds that the meaning relations of modals can be better understood through this analysis. In other words, the epistemic meaning is an extension of root meaning and it is the metaphorical mapping of image schemas that join the two meanings of English modality.Finally, the author discusses the contribution of the thesis made for English modals and its limitations. It is pointed out that it is promising to make further researches in the respect of teaching of English modals.