Necessity and Obligation Modals in English Academic Discourse: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Autor/in	Oktavianti, Ikmi Nur
Titel	Necessity and Obligation Modals in English Academic Discourse: A Corpus-Based Analysis
Quelle	In: Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 4 (2019) 1, S.47-59 (13 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	2527-6492
Schlagwörter	English for Academic Purposes; Second Language Learning; Second Language Instruction; North American English; Computational Linguistics; Verbs; Word Frequency; Language Usage + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Zweitsprachenerwerb; Fremdsprachenunterricht; Amerikanisches Englisch; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; Word analysis; Frequency; Wortanalyse; Häufigkeit; Sprachgebrauch
Abstract	Modals are linguistic units that seem to be ubiquitous in nearly all genres and text categories. However, there are some tendencies in which some modals are more likely to occur in a particular text category than the others. It is said that modals are less frequent in academic texts compared to fiction and news. This paper then aims at describing the modals, focusing to those expressing necessity/obligation, by using corpus-based analysis. This study uses a general reference corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English, and compiled the data from the academic subcorpus. The results show that statistically the usage frequency of necessity and obligation modals is negligible; however, no matter how small it is, it still purports to mark something. Among the modals in the same category there are some tendencies, e.g. modal should is the most frequent of all, followed by must, have to, shall, be supposed to, and have got to. The collocate analysis focuses on should and must and found out that the most frequent verb type following these two modals belong to thinking verbs (e.g., consider, learn, understand). However the most frequent modal constructions are should have and must have enabling a slightly different interpretation. Besides, due to the nature of language in an academic setting, it is thus predictable that the use of the core modals (e.g., should, must) is more frequent than the quasi-modals (e.g., have to). (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. English Department, Faculty of Education and Teacher Training, State Islamic Institute of Samarinda, Indonesia. e-mail: ijeltalj@gmail.com; Web site: https://ijeltal.org/index.php/ijeltal
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01