Subordinating Modalities
A Quantitative Analysis of Syntactically Dependent Modal Verb Constructions
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Beschreibung
This study is concerned with the use of the English modals (may, might, can, could, shall, should, will, would and must) in adverbial, relative and complement clauses. It employs synchronic data from the British National Corpus and quantitative methods to investigate similarities and differences between the core modals, as well as modal-specific preferences in subordinate clauses. The main finding is that modal verbs in subordinate clauses may be conceived of as meso-constructions and that they qualify as micro-constructions once further syntagmatic features are considered. This allows for distinguishing modal verb phrases with different degrees of complexity, schematicity, productivity and subjectivity. Further applications give us insights into collocations, modal harmony, semantic preference, and the attraction of dynamic meaning to relative clauses.
Contents
- Construction Grammar, Behavioural Profile Analysis
- Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis, Correspondence Analysis
- Monofactorial Analyses, Multifactorial Analyses
- Complexity, Schematicity, Productivity, Subjectivity
- Multicollinearity, Generalisability, Replicability
- Academics and students of English Linguistics
- Corpus linguists
Pascal Hohaus worked as a PhD student at University of Hanover (2014–2019). He is currently coordinating the online study programs Business and Media Informatics at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences (January 2020).
This study is concerned with the use of the English modals (may, might,can, could, shall, should, will, would and must) in adverbial, relative and complement clauses. It employs synchronic data from the British National Corpus and quantitative methods to investigate similarities and differences between the core modals, as well as modal-specific preferences in subordinate clauses. The main finding is that modal verbs in subordinate clauses may be conceived of as meso-constructions and that they qualify as micro-constructions once further syntagmatic features are considered. This allows for distinguishing modal verb phrases with different degrees of complexity, schematicity, productivity and subjectivity. Further applications give us insights into collocations, modal harmony, semantic preference, and the attraction of dynamic meaning to relative clauses.
provides an in-depth corpus-based investigation of subordinated modal verb phrases combining usage-feature analysis with collocational/colligational analysis applies construction grammar to modality including the notions of complexity, schematicity, productivity and subjectivity discusses replicability as a methodological challenge in conducting a follow-up study to validate the findings
Autor*in
Pascal Hohaus
Themen in »Subordinating Modalities«
modality modal verbs usage-based linguistics subordination construction grammar corpus-based analysis adverbial clauses relative clauses complement clauses correspondence analysis hierarchical configurational frequency analysis collocation colligation BNC British National Corpus