A Corpus-based Study Of Modal Sequences In Chinese English Majors' Spoken Language

This study adopts corpus-based approach to make a contrastive interlanguage analysis of modal sequences used in the spoken language by English native speakers(NS) and Chinese English majors(NNS).The observation corpus(learner corpus) is the speaking sections in L 2.0, including oral test sections in TEM-4 and TEM-8 examination, and the reference corpus(native corpus) employs Student Presentations and Colloquium in The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English(MICASE).The research questions are as follows: First, are there any differences between Chinese English majors and native speakers in the use of modal verbs? Second, compared with native speakers, what are the characteristics of modal sequences that exist in English majors' spoken language? Third, are there any distinctions in the use of modal sequences between low proficiency and high proficiency learners?Processing data from the two corpora by performing POS tagging(Tree-Tagger3), retrieving(Ant Conc), then calculating(Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator), the author draws the following conclusions:Firstly, the frequency of modal verbs used in learner's spoken language presents a extremely unbalanced phenomena. Compared with native corpus, can, should, will, could, must and may are overused, whereas would and might are underused in learner corpus. Secondly, there are five obvious characteristics in English majors oral English:(1) The first person plural pronoun and the third person plural pronoun are overused as the utterances' subjects before modal verbs, and after which the infinitives with unmarked aspect and voice are excessively used;(2) When the modal verbs collocate with negative word(not),learners tend to use “ modal verb + not ”;(3) Modal sequences beginning with would and might are less used, and after which the verbs with unmarked aspect and voice are frequently used;(4) Interrogative sentences made up of modal verbs and personal pronouns are obviously less used, especially “ modal verb+ you ”;(5) The sequence of “ people + modal verb ” is also frequently used in learner corpus. Thirdly,after comparing the two corpora of oral tests in TEM-4 and TEM-8, the conclusions are:(1) As for modal verbs, low-proficiency learners use more could and would than high-proficiency learners;(2) In terms of modal sequences, high proficiency learners use more stative verbs after modal verbs, and not just perceive personal pronouns as subjects before modal verbs;(3) All learners employ more deontic modality, but the use of epistemic modality also assume a definite proportion; for learners of higher English levels, more epistemic modality has been used.The research findings contribute both to oral English class teaching and the automatic scoring system.