A Study On The Volition Modal Verbs

Many language scholars have focused on the modality.This paper is a preliminary study of Volitive modality from the perspective of volition modal verbs.Firstly,based on the traditional classification of modality, namely Dynamic,Epistemic and Deontic modality,we further divided the Dynamic modality into Abilitive and Volitive modality and named all the objects we are going to talk about in this paper as the volition modal verbs.In the second chapter,we divided the volition modal verbs into five groups according to the source of the volitional semantics from diachronic perspective.The members of the first group are the core members of the volition modal verbs, which are directly associated with "willingness". The morphemes of them appeared very early, and all the members are still in use today. The second group are from the adjectives or psychological verbs which mean positive emotions such as "satisfaction or pleasure" through grammaticalization. The third group members are from the verbs which mean "look" through mechanisms such as metaphors. The fourth group members own the same semantic feature ——“future”.We can divide this group into two small groups: one group means "plan", and the other means“pure future”. The fifth group whose volition hierarchy is low are produced due to the effect of the pragmatic,and often used in negative or interrogative sentences. Our Study shows that the limited objects of our research indeed have common semantic basis--volition.We made a conclusion that the Volitive has the traits of willingness,irrealis and causality at the end of the second chapter.And then, under the background of Construction Grammar theory,we proposed the volitional chunk-construction and pointed out the causality between the four chunks :“source of volition-the volitional subject- the passing of the volition- the content of the volition”.We mainly analyzed the factors that determine which volition modal verb to choose and how the semantic features affect the syntactic in the construction.Thus,we connect the grammatical features with the semantic features of the volitional verbs,and eventually prove the existence of the Volitive modality as a semantic grammatical category from the perspective of volition modal verbs.