The Study On The Collocation Of “Modal Verb+Negative Verb”

This paper is based on markedness theory,it aims to describe the distribution of the collocation of “modal verb+negative verb”;it also attempts to interpret the expressive motivation of this collocation in the perspective of cognitive analysis and pragmatic linguisitcs.Considering the fact that the capacity of acceptence for the negative verbs changes with the types of modality,polysemic modal verbs are specially inspected in this paper.The main body of this paper includes four chapters.In chapter one,introductions about the research tasks and its values are clarified.This secetion also contains the progress and tendency related to this research.Besides,it presents research methods and the source of utterance materials briefly.Chapter two focus on inducing the survival environment of that collocation.It involves some fixed constuctions,special sentence patterns or sentences with special markers.Through furtherly analyzing,some licensing conditions with common features among the distributions can be extracted on the dimensions of mood and actuality.Specifically,some of the sentences which contain collocation of “modal verb+negative verb” tend to express negative mood;with regard to the category of actuality,they possess the feature of irrealis.In chapter three,five typical polysemic modal verbs are chosen as the main objects of observation,thus we can investigate the relevance between the types of modality and the capacity of acceptence for the negative verb.By comparative analysis,we can draw a conclusion that compared with epistemic modality and dynamic modality,when the polysemic modal verb refers to deontic modality,that collocation presents a higher degree of markedness as it almost only exists in the rhetorical questions or negative sentences which contain negative marker “bu”.In chapter four,we will explore why speaker would like to adopt this theoretically supernormal match from the perspectives of psychological cognition and pragmatic functions.On the one hand,influnced by certain genre and style,the negative semanteme of the negative verb may be deluted in the dynamic view,resulting a reasonable and low-marked acceptance for the modal verbs.On the other hand,in order to safeguard their own self-interest,speaker may be inclined to use the collocation of “modal verb+negative verb” in a competitive speech situaion to express their warning,threat,reprimand,explaination,dissuasion and other intentions.One last point is that the collocation of “modal verb+negative verb” can be survived when the background information is foregrounding or be regarded as the information superiority in the speech activities related to reasoning.