Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
English modals, or modal verbs, or English modal auxiliaries, are one of themost important and difficult grammatical items in English learning due to theircomplex meanings and usages. Many people, including some famous linguists, havedone a large number of researches about English modals from different perspectives.In recent years, more and more research findings on the use of English modals havebeen published. Among them, it is noticed that there exists an overuse of some of theEnglish modal verbs by non-native English speakers compared with that of the natives.Besides China, similar findings can also be seen from researches done by othercountries, such as Brazil, South Korea, etc. It is quite meaningful and interesting toprobe into this issue for so many Chinese English learners tend to misuse the Englishmodal verbs in both their written and oral productions.Considering the fact that there are differences between native English speakersand Chinese English learners in using English modal verbs and that the latter tend tooveruse some modal verbs, like Can, Must, Should, and underuse some other, likeCould, Shall, Might, the author tries to find out what might be the fundamental causeof this phenomenon. This misuse problem has long existed in English teaching inChina as well as countries and regions around the world. To tackle this problem, it isessential for us to analyze and find out the underlying causes, so that we can makeproactive changes in the teaching of English modals accordingly and enable students abetter leaning and acquisition of English modals, so as to improve our English modalverb teaching on the whole.
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1.2 Research Objectives
Lots of linguists and scholars have noticed that many Chinese English learners tend to overuse some English modal verbs and underuse some others, which has beenproved by a great many empirical studies and statistics in recent years. Some of themhave proposed briefly the possible causes of this phenomenon, but no study to datehas been done on the causes from the perspective of mental-space mapping. Thisthesis aims to provide a more profound and rational explanation to this issue byproposing the overmapping and undermapping hypotheses from the perspective ofmental-space mapping. Also an empirical research will be carried out to further justifythe explanation. Due to the constraint of time and energy, this thesis will primarilyfocus on one of the most frequently overused modal verbs Can, and its past participleCould, which is one of the most underused English modals. These two words areselected as the representatives of the research and the author believes that thisexplanation mechanism can be applied to other modal verbs as well.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Modality in Language
It has been widely acknowledged that the semantic description of modality is an“extremely complex area” (Hoye, 1997, p. 76). Palmer (1979, p. 1) claims that “thereis, perhaps, no area of English grammar that is both more important and more difficultthan the system of the modals”. Modality is the subject concerning modal verbs likeCan, Must and Should, which are used to modify the meaning of other verbs,expressing possibility, permissibility and probability. It has been studied fromdifferent perspectives by many linguists. Howev，英语毕业论文，英语毕业论文
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