Linguistic Universals: A Study Of The Mechanisms Of Change In English-Chinese Modal Verbs

The study of linguistic universals has become a main stream in modern linguistics. Modern linguists generally hold that the study of linguistic should not pay much attention to characters of single language and make endless descriptions about them, but view single language in the range of world language and find the common features of human languages and try to explain these universals. However, linguistic universals are often understood as the cross-linguistic generalizations on synchronic linguistic patterns, it is difficult for this kind of study to make useful conclusions since synchronic linguistic states resulted from the diachronic changes. In view of this, this study takes diachronic perspective. Through the diachronic study of change of English-Chinese modal verbs, we find the common paths of change and its motivation, that is, the common mechanisms of change. This is what significance of the study lies in.we choose the English-Chinese modal verbs as the object of this study. In synchronic dimension, English-Chinese modal verbs have the similar ambiguity between deontic and epistemic senses, are there regularities to be made behind this similar ambiguity? In this study, modality is regarded as a semantic category rather than a grammatical category. We adopt Bybee's diachronic triparitite—agent-oriented, speaker-oriented and epistemic modality—as our theoretical framework.First of all, this study reviews past unified analyses of modality by Lyons, Talmy and Sweetser. Then, we introduce the theory of grammaticalization and take it as my theoretical background. Next, the study examines the process of change of English-Chinese modal verbs. The study shows that there exists a strong...