A Contrastive Study Of Modal Verbs Used By English Majors And Native Speakers In Spoken English

Within the last few years, modal verbs have been a heated topic inlinguistic studies. Modal verbs are also a difficult grammar area forEnglish teaching and learning. So it is valuable and important to exploreEnglish modal verbs used by Chinese English majors.The present study takes six modal verbs CAN, COULD, SHOULD,WILL, WOULD and MUST as the research subjects. The study aims tocompare the use of modal verbs both by Chinese English majors and theircounterpart native English speakers from the aspects of frequency,semantic distribution, collocation and sentence patterns. And theunderlying reasons will be analyzed. The study employs the SECCLcorpus and ICE-GB corpus as the reference corpus which provideauthentic language data. The study adopts Contrastive InterlanguageAnalysis (CIA) method. The tools employed by the study are Monoconcpro2.2, Word Smith3.0, SPSS.13.0, CLAWS5, ICECUP.In response to the research questions, the study yields the followingfindings:(i) With regard to the frequency, among the six modal verbs English majors most frequently use CAN which mainly expresses thepossibility meaning while the native speakers most frequently useWOULD which mainly expresses volition and prediction. Besides,Compared to native speakers English majors tend to use SHOULD andMUST which mainly express obligation and necessity.(ii) As to semanticdistribution, English majors tend to use more root meaning than epistemicmeaning of modal verbs while native speakers use more epistemicmeaning than root meaning;(iii) In terms of collocation,“BE”,“HAVE”,“DO”,“NOT” are words frequently following modal verbs in ICE-GBSwhile “PAY”,“TAKE”,“SEE” are words frequently following modalverbs in SECCLS apart from stative verb “BE” and “HAVE”. So aconclusion can be drawn that the use of modal verbs are related to thetopics;(iv) As to the sentence patterns, English majors rarely use thesesentence patterns which are associated with epistemic meaning such asHave+EN construction, Progressive Aspect, Existential Subject andQuasi-modal as frequently as their counterpart native speakers. But thesyntactic patterns like Inanimate Subject and Stative Verb are used frequently by both English speakers and native speakers;(v) The studydiscovers that factors such as mother-tongue transfer, native culture,acquisition sequence and topics have an impact on the use of modalverbs.It is hoped that this study will shed some light on English modalverbs teaching and learning. It is also hoped that teachers pay moreattention to semantic categories and help students to master thepoly-semantic characteristic of modal verbs.