Might and might not: Children's conceptual development and the acquisition of modal verbs

When a child acquires her first modal verbs, is she learning how to map words in the language she is learning onto innate concepts of possibility, necessity, and impossibility? Or does she also have to construct modal concepts? If the concepts are constructed, does learning to talk about possibilities play a role in the construction process? Exploring this hypothesis space requires testing children's acquisition of modal vocabulary alongside nonverbal tests of their modal concepts. Here we report a study with 103 children from 4;0 through 7;11 and 24 adults. We argue that the data fit best with the hypothesis that acquisition of modal language and development of modal concepts proceed hand-in-hand. However, more research is needed, especially with 3-year-olds.

Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.

Tag Questions in English Spoken Discourse: Corpus-Based Linguistic and Pragmatic Analysis

Based on an integrative methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative methods of linguistic research, the authors consider grammatical forms, syntactic types and pragmatic functions of the tag question in British spoken discourse. The research material included samples of dialogues with tag questions taken from British contemporary fiction and the Spoken BNC2014. Drawing on the theory of linguistic metarepresentation and using corpus analysis tools the authors presented the model under study in structural-syntactic and functional-pragmatic perspectives and obtained reliable data on discourse realization of tag question models, specified their standard and common usage polarity status, distinguished bi- and monopolarity variations. An analysis of the tag question types that are distinguished as the combinations of the predicative and auxiliary parts shows that the most frequent type of tag question is the one formed with an affirmative predicative part and a negative tag. The corpus-based approach allowed obtaining quantitative data on frequencies of tag questions in British spoken discourse, retrieving the repertoire of tag questions with their grammatical representation. It is shown that in the corpus under study the most frequent form of the tag question is the form isn't it?. The least frequent forms of tag questions are the ones formed with the have verb, as well as the modal verbs will, may, can, which supports the thesis that tag questions are losing ground in British spoken discourse. Discourse-pragmatic analysis of utterance contexts with tag questions highlighted its discourse value in the British tradition of conversation, as they perform the following communicative functions: informational; etiquette; interpersonal-relation-corrective (focus-positive or focus-negative).

A Contrastive Study of Deontic Modality in Parallel Texts

This article is a contrastive study of deontic modal markers in three parallel texts. It analyses the modality system in the English, Russian and French texts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights accounting for the ambiguity of some English modal verbs in legal texts and the difficulty in rendering them into a different language. The research reveals modal markers used to express deontic permission, deontic obligation and deontic prohibition in the three parallel texts; semantic similarities and discrepancies between these modal markers; and translation strategies employed to render the English modal markers into Russian and French. The article responds to the need for a systematic analysis of deontic modal markers in English, Russian and French due to the semantic and syntactic differences among the German, Romance and Slavic languages. The article concludes that French and Russian have more in common than French and English or Russian and English in terms of the deontic modality.

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC IMAGE OF JOY (IN THE COMPUTER-ANIMATED FILM INSIDE OUT)

The paper is focused on the correlation between the psychological archetype of a film character and the linguistic elements composing their speech. The Nurturer archetype is represented in the film Inside Out by the personalized emotion Joy. Joy is depicted as an antropomorphous female character, whose purpose is to keep her host, a young girl Riley, happy. As the Nurturer, Joy is completely focused on Riley’s happiness, which is expressed by lexico-semantic group ‘happy’, positive evaluative tokens, exclamatory sentences, promissive speech acts, and repetitions. She needs the feeling of connectedness with other members of her family, which is revealed by lexico-semantic groups ‘support’ and ‘help’. She is ready to sacrifice everything to save the girl in her care, which is demonstrated by modal verbs, frequent word-combination ‘for Riley’, and directives.

An Analysis of Interpersonal Meaning of Modal Verbs in Abstracts from Scientific Papers: Case Study of Progress in Aerospace Sciences

The aims of this study are to explore the distribution features of modal verbs in abstracts from scientific papers, analyze the reasons for those features and figure out the role modal verbs play in achieving interpersonal meaning. The study has selected 60 abstracts randomly from Progress in Aerospace Sciences from 2015 to 2019 as research samples. It combines Halliday’s value of modality with Biber et al.’s two classifications to process modal verbs. The instruments adopted in this research are AntConc 3.2.4, manual sorting and SPSS Statistics 21. Based on the results, the study finds that: firstly, the overall occurrence of modal verbs in 60 abstracts is 59 times, among which low-value modal verbs are the most frequently distributed (74.6%), median-value modal verbs the second (22.0%) and high-value modal verbs the least (3.4%); secondly, the achievement of interpersonal meaning relies on value of modality, and when the value of modality is lower, a better degree of interpersonal meaning can be achieved; thirdly, high-value modal verbs achieve tough interpersonal meaning, median-value modal verbs achieve comfortable interpersonal meaning, and low-value modal verbs achieve harmonious interpersonal meaning.

The impact of pragmalinguistic support on video-conferenced collaborative suggestion-giving task

This study explored the impact of pragmalinguistic support on L2 users’ suggestion-giving task performance. Data came from 12 pairs of L2 users in a Zoom-mediated university course. They collaboratively wrote suggestions for improvement in their peers’ lesson plans using Office 365. Six pairs received pragmalinguistic support, while the others wrote their suggestions on their own. Audio-recorded pair discussions were coded qualitatively, and the written suggestions were analyzed in terms of linguistic and pragmatic characteristics. The results showed that pragmalinguistic support encouraged the participants to engage more in language-related and task-related episodes. Also, their suggestions contained more diverse lexical downgraders and conventional suggestion-giving expressions. By contrast, those who wrote suggestions without pragmalinguistic support engaged more in pragmatic-related episodes, relying extensively on epistemic modal verbs (e.g., would). The findings indicate that pragmalinguistic support may help L2 users to better attend to task content and language, producing lexically and pragmatically richer output.

Meaning Loss in Translating Commissive Speech Acts in Movie Subtitles from English into Kurdish

The paper aims at investigating translating commissive speech acts in movie subtitle from English into Kurdish. It attempts to identify the meaning loss, in other words deletion errors and then categorize them along with the illocutionary acts. The samples of the study are taken from the subtitle of the horror movie (Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud) which has been translated into the Kurdish language. First, twenty commissive speech act are identified as having translation problems in the movie according to Searle’s category, then their illocutionary acts are specified. The English and Kurdish subtitles are compared to find out the meaning loss and deleted items, in addition to the compatibility of the illocutionary acts between them. The results of the analysis show that ‘promising’ and ‘warning’ are the most challenging illocutionary acts for translators because of the number of deletion errors found in their translation. The most common type of meaning loss in the translation of commissive speech acts are adverbs, pronouns, exclamation words, main verbs, modal verbs, nouns, and adjectives, respectively.

Modelling through Modality: (Re)shaping Brexit

Due to Brexit, the UK has been involved in a continuous political debate between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition. This paper compares and analyses the modality used in a corpus consisting of their political speeches until Brexit day. Modal verbs are used to express ability, possibility, willingness, certainty, obligation and necessity. Politicians’ choice of certain words can be a useful tool to affect voters’ decisions and modality is a resource which reinforces that influence. The findings show remarkable similarities between both politicians and reveal that possibility is the most frequent meaning of the modal verbs used in the corpus.