A Study On The Use Of Modal Verbs In Academic Research Papers By Advanced Chinese EFL Learners

As one of the important and effective devices to express modality, English modal verbs have been widely used in both oral and writing texts and plays an significant role since modal verbs subtly express users’ attitudes and opinions on things or acts, such as possibility or obligation. Therefore, researches into English modal verbs have always been treated as an indispensible part of the development of grammar.However, modal verbs appear to be among the most complex and important grammatical phenomena. Despite their simple forms, modal verbs appear complicated in semantics, pragmatics and other aspects. Especially in different circumstances, a modal verb may bring out various meanings. Therefore, many linguists have put forward their distinctive ways to classify English modal verbs. Palmer (1974:51) believes there are four types of modality: epistemic, deontic, dynamic and evidential modality depending on the attitude a certain modal transfers. Later he presents another way to classify modal verbs:subject-oriented and discourse-oriented modals to clarify the role of an initiator or participants in a speech. Compared with Palmer’s classification of modal verbs, Halliday’s classification from the perspective of systemic functional grammar seems more delicate and convincing based on the degree of modality (2000). He supposes that there are three degrees of modality from high to low and the degree of modal verbs decides which group they should be included into. Opposite to Halliday’s precise classification of modal verbs, Coates Jennifer, pays her attention to the indeterminacy of the meanings of modal verbs and classifies indeterminacy into gradience, ambiguity and merger (1983:13). Depending on Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus, Biber (2000:73)classifies modal verbs into three groups in a practical perspective according to their semantics and frequency in specific use across a large variety of registers, which turns out to be a typical way at present to study modal verbs to compare the use of modal verbs so as to gain differences and similarities of the use of modal verbs in different registers with the support of corpora.As the use of modal verbs seems to frustrating Chinese English writers and findings of related researches suggest that English learners at high levels use modals in a similar way with the use of native English speakers, this study selects the nine central modal verbs:can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would as the object of the research based on the researches of Coates and Biber to make a comparison in order to identify whether there are differences between the advanced Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers in the use of the nine core modal verbs, including the semantic distribution and the frequency of the nine modal verbs.The present research chooses20academic essays from Applied Linguistics by Oxford University Press and27from Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in China, both of which are influential linguistic journals regarding applied linguistics.Contrastive Inter-language Analysis is adopted in this study, which compares the language of native English speakers and the inter-language of EFL learners to seek the similarities or differences in the use of modals. During the comparison, the frequency figures of all nine central modals will be checked to show the individual proportion of each modal within the papers from the two journals. Afterwards, the meanings of each modal will be annotated manually to distinguish the meanings contained in each individual modal verb to identify in which aspect the explicit similarities or differences in the use of each modal verb can be ascertained.This empirical research finds that even in the papers written by advanced English learners, there still exist differences in the use of modals compared with native English writers. To be specific, Chinese writers overuse can but underuse could, may and might to signify possibility. Additionally, must and should are more frequently adopted to transform the information of obligation by Chinese writers but the use of will and shall by Chinese writers is quite similar to that by native English speakers.All in all, this thesis is expected to provide adequate information for EFL learning as well as teaching in China.