Week6

Modal Auxiliary in British English : A Corpus-Based Study of Modality through British National Corpus

A Corpus-Based Study of Modality through British National Corpus

 

                            BNCweb is a useful device to explore practical usage in English language. Besides common grammatical knowledge, collocates can give new insight and broaden our point of view.

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 words in left and right position and, secondly, statistical methods. These two factors are subject to results of collocations 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.