| Modality has been a heated topic of philosophers, logicians andlinguists for a very long time and modal verbs are deeply studied by thelinguists with magnificent findings. But vagueness of modality still existsand makes the learners feel perplexed in the study. The thesis, whichfocuses on the central modal verbs, aims to account for the vagueness ofmodality with the prototype category theory and the metaphoricalprojection theory. The analysis manifests that the modals are categorizedwith the features of prototype categories: there being prototypes, intermediate members and peripheral members. This thesis holds thatdeontic modality is the prototype and epistemic modality is the periphery;the category members share family resemblances and the prototypicalfeatures fade off from the prototype to the peripheral members. Theprototypical members and non-prototypical members of every modal verbhave fuzzy, non-discrete boundary. The categorical features of modalsverify the connection between deontic modality and epistemic modality.The thesis further proves that between deontic modality and epistemicmodality, the latter is evolved from the former, and that the workingmechanism of the extension from deontic modality to epistemic modalityis the metaphorical projection based on the similar force-barrier imageschemas. The projection is unidirectional, that is, from deontic toepistemic, not vice versa, which fact is supported by the study of modal grammaticalization and modal acquisition of children. The meanings ofthe two subcategories are distinct but related. Modal indeterminacy viz.merger is reflected by the categorical fuzziness.Different from the earlier studies, which validate the root-epistemicdistinction by distinct syntactic and prosodic patterns, the present studyhas presented an in-depth discussion of the semantic interrelationbetween these two categories with a wide range of data, which gives anew horizon to the modal study and is helpful to a full comprehension ofmodal categories. |
