(Week 6) Modal Auxiliary in British

From I studied and read about “Modal Auxiliary in British: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF MODALITY THROUGH BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS” I can summarize the knowledge as follow:

👉 Introduction 👈

The British National Corpus contains approximately 100 million words and it is constructed by collection of various types of written British English of the late twentieth century for 90 percent and of different types of spoken data for 10 percent. BNCweb fundamentally provides means of corpus linguistic analysis”: “concordance”, “sort”, “thin”, “collocations”, “distribution”, “frequency breakdown” and etc. And this paper is particularly focused on three modal verb (“should”, “have to” and “must”).

👀 Objectives 👀

BNCweb will be specifically applied through chosen modal verbs in order to:

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

2. affirm that modalities can be interchangeable due to different contexts, such as gender, type of data, perceived level of difficulty and etc.

💭 Method 💭

Three modal verbs (“should”, “have to” and “must”) will be scrutinized by available functions via BNCweb in order to offer empirical information, such as grammatical usage and discursive practice, of modalities in British context.

💢 Conclusion 💢

Modal verbs “must”, “have to” and “should” have been explained in theoretical usage in many textbooks and sometimes each one has been exemplified by unrealistic examples. Through application of BNCweb, collocates can elucidate 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. However, the top list of collocates is flexible due to, firstly, a span of word in left and right position and, secondly, statistical methods. These two factors are subject to results of collocation if either the span or other statistical methods were to change to other values. Although the difference might be diminutive, other investigation is still appealing as it may enrich our point of view in modalities.