week 6

MODAL AUXILIARY IN BRITISH ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF MODALITY THROUGH BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

written by Kriangkrai Vathanalaoha

This paper present about  Modality, BNCweb and Corpus Linguistics.

📌BNCweb 

      provides means of corpus linguistic analysis. Is a useful device to explore practical usage in English Language. Beside common grammatical knowledge.

📌Objectives

- shed some light on modal verbs of which meaning are difficult to make distinction on theoretical background.

- affirm that modalities can be interchangeable due to different context, such as gender, type of data, perceived level of difficulty.

📌Methods

Three modal verbs (should, have to,must) will be scrutinized by available functions (distribution, collocation and concordance) via BNCweb in order to offer empirical information, such as grammatical usage and discursive practice, of modalities in British context. Details of methodology in each function will be subsequently explained in results and discussion section.

Modal verbs "must","have to","should" have been explained in theoretical usage in many textbooks and sometimes each one has been unforeseen patterns that co-occur with each modal verb and this will assist, at least, English teachers to give realistic examples to students from the top list of collocates.