A corpus-based study of congruent and metaphorical patterns of modality in English

ABSTRACT

Both collexeme analysis and correspondence analysis were implemented to investigate the relationship between congruent patterns of modality and metaphorical patterns of modality in different genres of American English and British English in this paper. The findings are summarised as follows: 1) modal adverbs and/or adjectives that are significantly attracted to congruent patterns of modality are also significantly attracted to metaphorical patterns of modality in both varieties of English; 2) the significant attraction in both congruent and metaphorical patterns of modality is genre-sensitive, i.e., it preferably happens in academic genre for the purpose of making propositions at issue non-negotiable and projecting authoritative stances to non-communicative readers; 3) the same significant attraction in both patterns of modality occurs more preferably in British academic genre than in American academic genre. This research is of significance in that it highlights not only metaphorical patterns of modality but also congruent patterns of modality; additionally, it also bridges theories in Systemic Functional Linguistics and advanced approaches such as collexeme analysis and correspondence analysis in Corpus Linguistics.

KEYWORDS:

• Congruent and metaphorical patterns of modality
• varieties of English
• genres
• collexeme analysis
• correspondence analysis

Acknowledgments

I wish to extend my thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and careful proofreading on the language issues. I am also grateful to Associate Professor Yanmei Gao from Peking University for her instruction on the early draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See Halliday (2004), Taverniers (2008), Yang (2015), and Yang (2019) for the identification of interpersonal metaphor of modality; Halliday & Matthiessen (2014), Liardét (2014, 2018), and Yang (2019) for the categorisation of interpersonal metaphor of modality; and Yang (2013), Liardét (2018), and He (2020) for the distribution of interpersonal metaphor of modality.

² See Stefanowitsch & Gries (2003), Hilpert (2014), and Zhou (2021) for more details.

³ See Glynn (2014) and Desagulier (2017) for more details.

⁴ Modality of inclination is not considered in this paper in that this type of modality is not realised by explicit objective expressions in English.

⁵ This construction has been termed as ‘it-extraposition’ in previous studies (Quirk et al., 1985; Kaltenböck, 2005; Zhang, 2017; inter alia).

⁶ Spoken is regarded as a kind of genre in that it mainly refers to conversations of TV and radio programmes in both corpora.

⁷ The formula that Heylighen & Dewaele (1999) proposed to compute the formality of genres is ‘F = (noun frequency + adjective frequency + preposition frequency + article frequency – pronoun frequency – verb frequency – adverb – interjection frequency + 100)/2’, which could be exemplified by the spoken genre in BNC, i.e., ‘F = (14.68 + 4.47 + 7.86 + 7.44–12.9-11.8–9.12-6.46 + 100)/2 = 47.09’.

8 It seems that genres in COCA are more balanced than those in BNC. However, this imbalance does not influence our analysis in Section 5 in that what matters in genres of this research is their normalised frequencies.

9 RF stands for raw frequency and NF stands for normalised frequency per million words.

¹⁰ Thanks to the anonymous reviewer who suggested that this point should also be considered.

Additional information

Funding

This project is supported by Beijing Municipal Social Sciences Foundation [Project No. 20YYB007], 1 July 2020-1 July 2023.