A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of The Characteristics Of Modal Verbs In Chinese And American College Students' Writing

This paper sets out to investigate the syntactic and semantic features of modal verbs in Chinese English learners'compositions written by English major students as compared to those used in the English native speakers'writing. By query into the two learner corpora WECCL and LOCNESS, a contrastive study of modal verbs is conducted with reference to the frequency figures, collocations and semantic distributions across these two datasets. This study shows that the overall frequency of modal verbs in Chinese learners'compositions outstrips its counterparts in native speakers'writing. Specifically, in Chinese learners writing the deontic modals such as can, must, should are prominently overused whereas epistemic modals such as would and might have been underused. Another striking feature in WECCL is the excessive use of first person subjects we and I before modal verbs which contrasts sharply with the third person subjects before modal verbs occurring in LOCNESS. The main verbs following modal auxiliaries tend to be communication/cognition verbs such as think, find, feel, say and see in Chinese learners'writing while this tendency is not present in LOCNESS. Other grammatical devices like modal adjuncts and quasi modal verbs are found more frequently to co-occur with core modal verbs in LOCNESS rather than in WECCL. In conclusion, Chinese English learners have not fully realized the function of modal verbs to express uncertainty and doubt and convey views tentatively to readers.