"comparative Study" And "may" In English Modal Words

Based on the Mood and Modality Theory of linguistic area, this paper analyses the meanings of two commonly used modal words:"keyi"in Chinese and"may"in English respectively, and also contrasts these two words. To do so, we believe, is significant in two major ways. In terms of language application, the description of the auxiliary verb"keyi"'s meanings is beneficial to teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and the contrastive analysis of"keyi"and"may"will provide some theoretical basis to how to translate modal words in Chinese and English. In terms of language research, the way of the description of the auxiliary verb"keyi"'s meanings will provide us with a wholly new perspective when we intend to describe other auxiliary verbs, and the corresponding analysis of"keyi"and"may"in Chinese and English parallel corpus and the analysis of different modality devices of Chinese and English will make it possible that we are likely to unearth other differences concerned with the whole modal system of two languages, which lays a foundation for our further research.First, we make a brief survey of the research situation of Chinese auxiliary verbs, and thus we know that the description of auxiliary verbs'meanings is a weak link in Chinese language research, while the description of English auxiliary verbs'meanings on the basis of Modality Theory in English language research is fruitful, which enlightens us on that of Chinese"keyi"'s meanings. Western Modality Theory is basically established based on Indo-European languages, and so,is unsuitable to Chinese language.In addition, western linguistic world are still not in agreement on Modality Theory. Therefore, we define and classify the concept of Modality again according to our examination of a great deal of Chinese and English corpus. Based on the Modality Theory of our own, we analyse the meanings of"keyi"in Chinese and"may" in English respectively, and also contrasts these two words.And furthermore, we sum up the translation method of"keyi","bukeyi","may","may not"on the basis of foregoing contrastive analysis and Chinese and English parallel corpus.We come to a conclusion that the meanings of modal words"keyi"and"may"have general characteristics, and individual ones as well. Their general characteristics are as follows:①"keyi"and"may"can indicate the meanings of both epistemic and deontic modality.②"keyi"and"may"are identical in some lexical items. Their individual characteristics are as follows:①as far as epistemic modality is concerned,"keyi"is used to make judgement by inference according to known facts or objective existence, which is only concerned with future time, and"may"is used to make purely subjective judgement , which is concerned with past, present and future time.②as far as deontic modality is concerned,"keyi"is used to indicate that the agent of a sentence is willing to do sth. as a result of being restricted by objective conditions, and"may"is used to indicate that the speaker hopes sth. happen in his or her heart of hearts. We also make some contrastive study of the negative structure of"keyi"and"may". In terms of syntactic features,"keyi"in Chinese can have negative in front or at the back of it:"bu+keyi"and"keyi+bu", and"bu"in the former modifies"keyi","bu"in the latter the verb or verbal phrase after"keyi"; While"may"in English only has negative at the back of it, and"not"can modify both"may"and the verb or verbal phrase after"may".Therefore,"may not"is ambiguous in English. In terms of semantic tendency,"bukeyi"is mainly relevant to"permission"of deontic modality, but"keyibu"to both epistemic and deontic modality. Although it has a fixed syntactic structure,"may not"shows certain semantic tendency when"not"modifies"may"or the verb or verbal phrase after"may",that is, it is mainly relevant to deontic modality when"not"modifies"may",and mainly to epistemic modality when the verb or verbal phrase after"may".