Bozdağ Fatih Ünal, Morris Gareth, Mo Junhua
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Osmaniye Korkut Ata University, Fakiusagi Mah, 80000, Merkez Osmaniye, Turkey.
Centre for English Language Education, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, 315100, China.
Heliyon. 2024 Mar 27;10(7):e28701. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e28701. eCollection 2024 Apr 15.
Modal verbs, with their multifaceted semantic nuances and varied grammatical configurations, present notable challenges for L2 learners and regularly intrigue L2 researchers. This study attempts to investigate and compare how English modal verbs are used by L2 learners from different L1 backgrounds. By exploring the Turkish and Chinese learners' subcorpora of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), this work scrutizes the overall frequencies of nine core English modal verbs as grouped into three major semantic classes along with the influential lexico-syntatic variables that are semantic classes of collocated verbs, grammatical patterns and subject pronominality. The results of a Bayesian probabilistic analysis show that both the Turkish and Chinese learners primed similar modal verbs and constructional preferences without topic as the normalizing factor. While the broader analysis reveals no statistically significant divergences between these two learner groups in English modal verb preferences, a pronounced contextual influence is evident when the dataset narrows to essays on a unified theme. This nuanced shift underscores the intricate relationship between essay topics and linguistic structures, thus emphasizing the pivotal role of context in modal verb usage.
情态动词具有多方面的语义细微差别和多样的语法结构，给二语学习者带来了显著挑战，并经常引起二语研究者的兴趣。本研究试图调查和比较来自不同母语背景的二语学习者如何使用英语情态动词。通过探索国际英语学习者语料库（ICLE）中土耳其语和汉语学习者的子语料库，这项工作详细审查了九个核心英语情态动词的总体频率，这些动词被分为三个主要语义类别，同时还审查了有影响的词汇-句法变量，即搭配动词的语义类别、语法模式和主语代词性。贝叶斯概率分析的结果表明，在没有主题作为归一化因素的情况下，土耳其语和汉语学习者都倾向于使用相似的情态动词和结构偏好。虽然更广泛的分析表明这两组学习者在英语情态动词偏好上没有统计学上的显著差异，但当数据集缩小到关于统一主题的文章时，明显的语境影响就显现出来了。这种细微的变化突出了文章主题与语言结构之间的复杂关系，从而强调了语境在情态动词使用中的关键作用。
