A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Modal Verbs In English Political Speeches By Different Genders

Regardless of gender, successful speakers have the ability to infect the emotions of audience by their own words. However, whether there are any differences between language and gender has not yet reached a consensus, and the possible reason lies in the fact that the scope of previous studies may be too wide and data drawn from corpus were seldom employed in the analysis.This corpus-based study, combining quantitative and qualitative methods, focuses on modal verbs in English political speeches. In the qualitative research, the thesis calculates the high frequency modal verbs occurred in the comparative corpora. It indicates that there are significant gender differences both in the overall choices of the modal verbs and in the frequencies of the eight modal verbs,such as "will","would","should". In the use of another modal verb "can", women and men differ in its collocation with person pronouns,rather than its frequencies. For the frequencies of the modal sequence, the "second/ third person pronouns + can" used by women are significantly higher than by men. For the perspective of the values of modality,the frequencies of the medium value modal verbs are much higher than the high value and the low value ones regardless of gender. In addition,the frequencies of the high value and the medium value modal verbs used by men are significantly higher than by women. Besides, women use more low value modal verbs than by men, however, there is no significant difference. For the perspective of the modal meanings, there is no significant difference of modal meanings of all the high frequency modal verbs used by men and by women in English political speeches. And for the overall use of modal verbs, the frequencies of the epistemic modal meaning, the deontic modal meaning and the dynamic modal meaning used by men and by women are similar. That is,when they use the same modal verb or the same value modal verbs, their modal meanings are similar.In the qualitative analysis, some specific examples of English political speeches arel extracted and analyzed with the help of the data of the modality values and the modal meanings on the basis of the quantitative study. According to the context, the high (medium,low) value modal verbs and the modal meanings used by men and by women are analyzed.It includes the gender of speaker, the date of the speech, the speech topic, the speech background. And also the reasons why they choose the high (or medium and low) value modal verbs or certain kinds of modal meanings are deeply analyzed and elaborated.The results of this research are expected to be able to provide a more objective and direct basis for the choice of words for those who are going to deliver political speeches in English, and facilitate the study of use of modal verbs in English education.