A Corpus-Based Study On The Written Form Of Chinese English Majors' Use Of Modal Sequences

This study analyzes the difference of modal sequences used in the sub-corpus of Chinese Learner English Corpora (CLEC) and the essays written by university students in Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNEE) and British National Corpus (BNC) from the view of syntax and semantics. The purpose of the study is to investigate the characteristic of modal sequences used by Chinese English majors in their writing. The major method employed in this study falls in the realm of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) on the basis of corpus. Through the application of advanced software, this thesis reaches the following results after the data statistics and analysis.Firstly, the frequency of modal verbs used by Chinese English majors differs greatly from it used by British and American university students. Compared with Liang Maocheng's study (2008) which focused on the study of modal sequences used by non-English majors, must is not overused by English majors in this study.Secondly, there are three prominent characteristics in English majors'writing. (1) The first and second pronouns are overused as the subjects before modal verbs, and verbs with unmarked tense and aspect are also overused after the modal verbs. Most of the overused unmarked verbs are dynamic verbs, which is inconsistent with native speakers who are more likely to use stative verbs. (2) Modal sequences are constituted by could, would are underused. In particular, the passive voice after the modal verb is underused. (3) English learners tend to use the modal sequence of"People + Modal Verb". The above three points demonstrate that English learners overuse the deontic modal sequences.Thirdly, in contrast with Liang Maocheng'study, English majors adopt modal verbs and modal sequences better than non-English majors. The author also finds that the frequency of deontic modality used by English majors is much lower than non- English majors. So, we can prove Liang Maocheng's inference that the frequency of deontic modal sequences is relevant to learners'language proficiency.This result shows some light on English teaching and leaning and testing. (1) Modal verbs should be learned within modal sequences, just like the collocation must be taken into consideration when we learn new words. It is helpful for us to learn the native modal sequences when we make a comparison between native corpus and learner corpus. (2) It is difficult for learners to express some complicated modality in their writing when learners tend to overuse the deontic modality and underuse the epistemic modality. And there are strong narrative characteristics expressed in their writing. It is a very good attempt and application to make use of the result of corpus linguistics in writing class. (3) It has some reference function to the automated essay scoring systems.