Do Learner Language And Translational Language Have Anything In Common?

Studies on the learner language and the translational language have revealed that these two languages are independent languages in their own right that differ from the original native language. They can be seen as what Baker (1996) called the "mediated communicative events" as they are situated somewhere between the first language and the second language (for learner language), or between the source language and the target language (for translational language). Characteristics of their own have also been found, among which are Interlanguage Universals (of learner language) and Translation Universals (of translational language). Based on these, researchers have put forward the hypothesis of "mediation universals", that is, there might be some similarities between the learner and translational languages, though little has been done on this issue.This paper attempts to investigate this issue from the perspective of modal verbs, as they are an important way to express modality and the acquisition of modal verbs has also been found in previous studies to be problematic for English learners as well as native speakers of English. Therefore, in this dissertation, the use of modal verbs in the learner language and the translational language will be studied respectively and a comparison will be made to see if any similarity exists.This study takes a corpus-based approach as a corpus can provide us with many empirical linguistic data. Based on argumentative essays from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL)2.0and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), the use of modal verbs in the learner language will be investigated; while employing comparable fictional data from the Translational English Corpus (TEC) and a native corpus, namely the British National Corpus (BNC), the use of modal verbs in the translational language will be studied. A comparison between the uses of modal verbs in these two kinds of languages will be then made from the perspective of frequency and collocations.