A Corpus-based Study On Features Of Modal Verbs In Learners' Academic Writing

Modality is an important means to fulfill interpersonal function in discourse.Modal verbs usually express authors' attitude,opinion and the certainty of propositions.Expressing doubt and certainty properly is the key to a successful academic writing.Modal verbs can soften or strengthen the tone and using them properly in academic writings can help readers easily understand and accept authors' point of view.Thus modal verbs have been a heated subject among linguists.The previous study on academic writings shows that there exist different problems in the proper use of modal verbs by Chinese English learners.The present research tries to analyze the using features of modal verbs between Chinese English learners and native speakers and aims to explore the difficulties of Chinese EFL learners in the use of modal verbs in academic writings.To find the differences in using modal verbs in academic writings between the Chinese English learners and English native speakers,this study intends to answer the following research questions: 1)What are the differences in the frequency of modal verbs in academic writings between Chinese EFL learners and the native speakers? 2)What are the collocation features of modal verbs in academic writings between Chinese EFL learners and the native speakers?This study is based on the classification of Biber et al.(1999)and investigates the uaage features of the nine central modal verbs by comparing the Chinese MA thesis corpus and English international journals of academic corpus.By using WordSimith5.0 the present research aims to calculate the frequency and finds the collocation features on modal verbs in the two corpora.This research tries to testify whether there exists significant differences in frequency and collocation of the nine modal verbs between the two corpora.The research finds that: 1)there are significant differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers in the use of modal verbs in frequency.Chinese English learners overuse some high and medium modal verbs in their academic writing such as: can,will and should and underuse may,would and might;2)plenty of clusters that commonly used by English learners are not frequently used in native speakers' academic writings.English learners overuse animate pronoun as the subjects of modal verbs,which causes the lack of objectivity in their academic writings.Compared with native speakers,Chinese English learners depend too much on single sentence pattern when making expressions of modal verbs.The overuse,underuse and the monotonous sentence pattern of modal verbs may be caused by the order of acquisition,language transfer and the imperfect understanding of modal verbs.This research of modal verbs in academic writing has reference significance on the teaching of academic writings and provides suggestions for Chinese English learners' academic writings.