THE FUNCTIONAL-SEMANTIC FEATURES OF MODAL VERBS IN BRITISH ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF THE BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

Abstract

Modal verbs constitute an important part of the English grammatical system because they express such meanings as ability, possibility, probability, obligation, permission, prediction and willingness. Their interpretation depends not only on their grammatical form but also on the communicative context in which they occur. The present study examines the functional-semantic features of English modal verbs from a corpus-based perspective, with particular emphasis on the British National Corpus (BNC). The study focuses on the central modal verbs can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would. The BNC is treated as the principal source of linguistic evidence because it contains a broad range of written and spoken British English. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is used as a supplementary comparative source in order to identify selected differences between British and American English. The analysis demonstrates the importance of corpus evidence for distinguishing between the formal grammatical category of modality and its context-dependent pragmatic and semantic functions. Particular attention is paid to the distribution of modal meanings across written and spoken registers and to the relationship between modal forms and communicative purposes. The study contributes to corpus-based descriptions of contemporary British English and demonstrates the usefulness of BNC data for functional-semantic analysis.