A Comparative Study On The Use Of Modal Verbs By Chinese And American English Learners

Modality is often used to show users' attitudes and opinions on things or acts,and modal verbs,which are widely used in English,are the main way to express modality.In recent years,Chinese scholars have achieved fruitful results on the comparison of modal verbs by Chinese English learners and native English speakers.Based on the results of previous research,this thesis aims to self-build corpora and conduct comparative studies with corpus tools.On the condition that the research subjects are both English learners and are both given the same topics simultaneously,the author tries to compare the differences of the use of modal verbs by Chinese and American English learners.The research procedures are as follows:first,the author designs ten topics for the topic-given writing,collects essays by Chinese and American English learners and constructs corpora with the aid of the Chinese supervisor in Hebei Agricultural University and the American supervisor in Doane University,where the author receives cooperative training;second,in accordance to Biber's classification and semantic description,nine central modal verbs can,could,will,would,may,might,must,shall,should are chosen as the research focus;third,quantitative and qualitative studies are done to analyze the use of modal verbs.With PowerConc,the author compares the features of overall frequencies,semantic distributions and syntactic patterns of modal verbs;fourth,Chi-square test is adopted to verify whether there exist significant differences in the use of modal verbs by Chinese and American English learners.The research results show that:1)In terms of frequency,Chinese English learners overuse modal verbs can,will,may,must,while underuse euphemistic modal verbs could,would,might;2)As for semantic distributions,when signifying possibility,Chinese learners prefer can and may,while the Americans like can,could and might.When indicating ability,could is underused by Chinese learners.When conveying the meaning of necessity,Chinese learners overuse must;3)With regard to the syntactic patterns,American learners prefer passive voice,especially after the modal verbs can and should.After the subsequent interviews and related analysis,language transfer,acquisition order and polysemy of modal verbs are found as the possible explanations on the overuse and underuse of modal verbs by Chinese English learners.On the basis of the same collection time and writing topics,the author analyses the similarities and differences on the modal verbs used by Chinese and American English learners with similar language competence.This thesis would be conductive to Chinese learners to be more conscious of their problems,hence to improve their learning methods,raise the level of using modal verbs or even the ability of using English comprehensively.