A Study On Modal Verbs In English Spoken And Academic Texts From The Perspective Of The Cardiff Grammar

Since discourse analysis was put forward by Z. Harris(1952), there has been no consensus on the approaches to analyzing discourses in academic field, as demonstrated in the current literature. While large quantity of practices on discourse analysis taken on by systemic functional linguists have verified that Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG) has provided us with a practical and effective approach to discourse analysis. Nevertheless, they have attached more importance to the metafunctions of discourses and have done less at the level of syntax,mainly concerned with the compositions of units, elements, and items. Therefore, as an alternative to SFG, the Cardiff Grammar has presented a comprehensive framework integrating descriptive, generative and cognitive methodologies for discourse analysis, which can make up for the deficiency of current theories and approaches.Modal verbs, as main components of the whole modality system, have been and will always be the focus of the academic and philosophical researches not only in modal logic, but also in modern linguistics. In particular, they have been viewed as important means to express the interpersonal metafunction in discourse in SFG. And they have been attached with four broad types of meaning in the Cardiff Grammar, which lay out the semantic framework for the present study. As can be seen from current literature, the studies on modal verbs have a close relationship with discourse analysis. And the previous studies on modal verbs are mainly concerned with academic, forensic, advertisement and news texts, in which the type of the corpora is single, and many of them are selected by the author randomly, which may have the disadvantages of strong subjectivity and weak scientificity. Therefore, this study has chosen a corpus of naturally occurring languages, named the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA), which is large enough to analyze the similarities and differences of modal verbs in distinct registers. As corpus findings show the clearest contrast between the application of modal verbs in spoken texts and academic texts, this study will concentrate on the two distinct registers.In order to analyze the application of modal verbs in spoken and academic texts through the Cardiff Grammar with the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology, this study presents four questions as follows:(1) What is the distribution of different modal verbsin spoken and academic texts? What are the similarities and differences? What are the sources and motivations underlying them?(2) What is the distribution of the same modal verb in spoken and academic texts? What are the similarities and differences? What are the sources underlying them?(3) How do the modal verbs of high frequency in spoken and academic texts represent strands of meaning in the Cardiff Grammar?(4) What is the distribution of modal verbs in various syntactic structures in spoken and academic texts? What is the relationship between the syntactic structures and the meanings expressed by the modal verbs?Based on the above four questions, the present study has the following findings. Firstly,there are similarities and differences between distribution of different modal verbs in spoken texts and academic texts, which can be attributed as the characteristics of the modal verbs with frequent and rare usage in all registers. Secondly, there are differences between the same modal verb in the two registers respectively, mainly due to the features of spoken and academic languages. Thirdly, as for the strands of meaning expressed by modal verbs, all the modal verbs concerned with in this study mark multiple strands of meaning, which may be determined by the ambiguous essence of modal verbs. Therefore, to distinguish the meanings expressed by modal verbs should depend upon the context. In addition, as is shown by the data of the distribution of these meanings, there is a tendency that the root meaning is of rare usage and the epistemic meaning is of frequent usage, for people tend to low down the responsibility on making commons about the truth-value of the propositions, and show a kind of tolerance and understanding of different opinions. Fourthly, there exists a kind of interdependent relationship between the meanings expressed by modal verbs and the syntactic structures in which modal verbs happen, and the meanings are constrained by these syntactic structures.The overall structure of the whole thesis is as follows. Chapter one provides a general introduction to the research background, questions, purpose and significance, methodology as well as the overall structure of the thesis. Chapter two presents a literature review of the Cardiff Grammar and modality at home and abroad. Chapter three illustrates the theoretical framework including the Operator test in the Cardiff Grammar, the comparison of metafunctions with strands of meaning, and studies on modal verbs in the Cardiff Grammar.Chapter four analyzes the application of modal verbs in English spoken and academic textswith the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology, describes similarities and differences of distribution, explores the underlying sources, summarizes the many strands of meaning expressed by modal verbs and discusses the distribution of modal verbs in various syntactic structures in particular. Chapter five comes to the conclusion of the whole thesis,presents major findings, points out limitations of the study, and also gives suggestions for further studies.