Interactive Relations Between Senses Of Modal Verbs And The Subjective/Objective Formal Semantic Features

“Subjectivity” is such a characteristic of language,which means when uttering a sentence,the speaker also expresses his or her position,attitude and emotion,thus leaving the speaker?s marks on the utterance.English modal verbs are often subjective because they are mainly used to express the speaker's position,attitude and emotion about the possibility of the proposition being true.The subjective and objective meanings of modal verbs are mainly influenced by the subjective and objective factors(formal and semantic features)in the context.Therefore,clarifying the interactive relationship between modal verb senses and subjective/objective formal semantic features is of great theoretical and practical significance to correctly identify the senses of modal verbs,to eliminate ambiguity,and to understand natural language and machine translation.Based on a 1.5-million-word self-built multi-genre English corpus and the formal concept analysis(FCA)theory,this paper explores the interactive relationship between modal verb senses and co-occurred subjective and objective semantic,syntactic and genre features with the help of attribute partial-ordered tools.In this thesis,the English modal verb must is taken as the target word,and its senses are mainly divided into three kinds: must(obligation),which tends to be objective;must(inference),which tends to be subjective and must(necessity),which unities the subjective and objective usages,according to the modality semantics and the Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary.289 sample sentences are extracted from the corpus as the research objects,of which 100 belong to the necessity sense,100 belong to the inference sense and the other 89 belong to the obligation sense.The subjective and objective semantic features,syntactic features and genre features are extracted respectively from the context.Among the syntactic features,speaker with authority,speaker's involvement and so on are classified as subjective features;and the speaker without authority,speaker?s non-involvement and so on are classified as objective features.Based on the above 289 objects and their features,the formal context is established,and the relationship between the senses of must and its related features is explored by means of the attribute partial-ordered structure diagram(APOSD).In this research,speaker?s authority(the subjective feature)and the formal genre(the objective feature)affect the obligation must;the speaker involvement and the informal genre(the subjective features)affect the necessity must;the perfect aspect,progressive aspect,informal genre(the subjective features)and the speaker?s non-authority and non-involvement(the objective features)affect the inference must.