A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Modal Verbs In Research Articles By Chinese Authors And Native Speakers

Although modal verbs are simple in form,they are complex from the semantic and pragmatic perspective.As the significant part of traditional grammar,modal verbs are the main way to express modality.Modal verbs which can express the subjective attitudes towards a certain behavior or opinions about an event are widely used in English.Many scholars at home and abroad have conducted deep and extensive research on modal verbs from different perspectives.Due to the misuse of modal verbs in research articles,a large number of scholars cannot even publish the papers to international top journals.It is quite a challenge for domestic scholars to use modal verbs with accuracy.Therefore,it is necessary to make detailed analysis about the use of modal verbs in academic discourse.As an important way to exchanges academic information among experts and scholars from various countries,research articles have become the major concern of academic circle.In the current field of academic writing research,discourse analysis of research articles is one of the research hotspots.With the rapid development of computer technology,corpus approach has been widely adopted in discourse analysis of research articles which is the great shift from the traditional qualitative analysis in discourse analysis.In the past,qualitative analysis was mainly employed to analyze enormous research articles.Nowadays,both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis can be adopted in discourse analysis due to the corpus approach.In addition,linguistic research based on a large amount of research articles can also improve the accuracy of the research and offer practical guidance for domestic scholars to use modal verbs more accurately and correctly.This paper mainly adopts a quantitative approach;it makes a comparative analysis of the application of modal verbs in research articles between Chinese authors and native speakers based on CRAC and COCA corpus.It also analyzes the distribution of different modal verbs used in research articles from the perspective of both syntax and semantics.The result shows that domestic scholars tend to overuse modal verbs.Specifically,the modal verbs CAN,WIIL,SHOULD are often abused,while COULD,WOULD,SHALL,MUST,MIGHT are often underused;there are obvious differences in the use of modal verbs in research articles between Chines authors and native speakers.Domestic scholars often underuse modal verbs such as “could”,“would”.Through the corpus-based comparative analysis modal verbs in research articles by Chinese authors and native speakers,this article enables domestic scholars to understand the specific problems of the overuse of modal verbs,that is,there is a strong tendency toward colloquialization to enable Chinese scholars to use modal verbs in the way as native speakers do in writing research papers.