A Study On Commonality Of Modality Between English "Can" And Chinese "Neng" From The Perspective Of Semantic Map

The study of language universality has always been a hot topic.A great number of languages are found to have obvious commonalities.For instance,scholars agree that English and Chinese have a lot in common in terms of their polysemy and the semantic development.Unfortunately,most previous studies of language commonalities are conducted from synchronic viewpoints,ignoring the diachronic evolution of language meanings.In view of this,a diachronic analysis of semantic evolution of English and Chinese will be conducted.Based on the self-built corpus collecting around 3000 examples containing Chinese modal verb “neng” and English modal verb “can”,a qualitative and quantitative analysis has been conducted to draw the semantic maps of English “can”and Chinese “neng” respectively for the intention of finding out the similarities among the semantic developments of the two modal verbs.After a careful observation,it is found that the same diachronic evolutionary path of English modal verb “can” and Chinese modal verb “neng” can be generalized.That is to say,along their modal sense path,both Chinese modal verb “neng” and English modal verb “can” develop from their basic sense “general ability” to the meaning “root possibility”,“permission” and “epistemic possibility” respectively.Besides,both of them,though from different language families,split their dynamic modality into deontic and epistemic modality.The reasons for their bearing the similarities in their semantic evolutionary paths are that they have shared motivations: “strategic interaction”,“language acquisition”.They also have shared mechanisms: “metaphor”,“generalization”.The discovery of similarities between English and Chinese modal verbs definitely adds the evidence of the language universality and is of great significance to English learning and teaching.