A corpus-based study of explicit objective modal expressions in English

ABSTRACT

The grammatical pattern of explicit objective modal expressions and its three subtypes (i.e., explicit objective expressions of probability, usuality and obligation) are investigated in this paper. By implementing a collostructional analysis, specifically collexeme analysis and multiple distinctive collexeme analysis, we aim at uncovering how, with respect to different genres in COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), modal expressions are significantly attracted or repelled by the grammatical pattern, and how these expressions are diachronically associated with the grammatical pattern in different time periods of COCA and COHA (Corpus of Historical American English). The genre-related findings demonstrate that explicit objective modal expressions of probability and obligation are attracted by formal genres while repelled by informal ones, whereas those of usuality are repelled by both formal academic and informal spoken genres. The diachronic findings demonstrate that modal expressions that denote low values of probability and obligation have undergone a path of gradual change from repulsion to attraction because of an accumulation of negotiability and politeness by language users.

KEYWORDS:

• Metaphor of modality
• explicit objective modal expressions
• attraction
• collostructional analysis
• cluster analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ expected and required in the projecting clauses it’s expected and it’s required respectively might be regarded as verbs; however, this research does not concern their grammatical categories and thus terms them as modal expressions to cover both modal adjectives like possible and necessary and verbs like expected, required, etc.

² Sequence is a semantic concept, referring to the constitution of different figures which are composed of such elements as processes, participants, and circumstances (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999). Considering the sequence because these tasks were difficult, they needed to allocate one extra packer, it is composed of two figures such as these tasks were difficult and they needed to allocate one extra packer. Each of the two figures consists of different elements, for instance, the process needed to allocate and participants like they and one extra packer in the latter figure.

³ Clause complex, clause, and group are different ranks in the lexicogrammatical stratum. A clause complex in Halliday’s sense is composed of two or more clauses which further consist of more than one groups.

⁴ This number is calculated on July 13, 2020.

⁵ Genres in this research should not be understood in Martin and Rose’s sense who defined genres as ‘staged, goal-oriented social processes’ (Martin & Rose 2007: 8, 2008: 6), but be interpreted as a term which is synonymous to text types (Biber et al. 1999).

⁶ Spoken is regarded as a type of genres on the ground that it generally refers to conversations of TV and radio programmes in COCA.

⁷ The restriction of a to or that clause is justified by the fact that the search query “it [vb*] [j*]” will yield such clauses as it is nice, which does not belong to the scope of EOMEs and thus should be precluded.

⁸ The binominal test, which does not rely on the sample size very much, is an exact test to measure the associative strength between modal expressions and EOMEs.

⁹ This approach is fulfilled by the function hclust in R.

¹⁰ Thanks to Professor Stefan Th. Gries for the sharing of his R script of VNC.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jiangping Zhou

Jiangping Zhou is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Peking University, Beijing, China. He is also a lecturer of Linguistics at China West Normal University. His research interests include Systemic Functional Linguistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. Recently, he published research articles in Journal of Quantitative Linguistics and Journal of World Languages.