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previous studies on quasi-modal be able to both abroadand at home. Through the literature review of be able to, we can have a comprehensiveun deratanding of the research objective in this thesis.Be able to, with the advantages of its close semantic relationship to the primarymodal can as well as the increasingly growing frequency used in both written and spokenEnglish, is sufficiently grounded for its inclusion in this thesis. Its semantic meanings andrelationship with can will be reviewed as followed.Hermerén (1978: 83) argues that “be able to will be used as a paraphrase of can (inthe ability sense).” Quirk et al. (1985: 236) think that be able to expresses the meaning ofability and possibility. Coates (1983: 124) supports the view that be able to covers thewhole range of meaning associated with can. Besides, she claims that be able to has themeaning “manage to” or “succeed in” when refers to a single non-past event, and “be ableto focuses dramatically on the event in the past and emphasizes the achievement of thatevent”. (ibid: 128) Also she conducts a comprehensive comparison between be able to andcan from the perspectives of form, distribution, aspect and meaning.
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2.2 Previous studies on modal co-occurrence
This section mainly states the previous studies on modal co-occurrence both abroadand at home. Modal co-occurrence is common situation in quasi-modals. Through theliterature review of modal co-occurrence, we can have a comprehensive underatanding ofthe research objective in this thesis.Multiple modals refer to the construction in which more than one modal occurs in asingle sentence. Similarly, we have the definition of double modals: a syntacticconstruction in which two modal auxiliaries occur consecutively within a clause, as mightcould in I might could help you. Here, the modals refer to primary modals such ascan, could, may, might, must, ought to, should, will, and would, as well as somequasi-modals such as would better, need to, supposed to, and used to (Di Paolo 1989).However, not all arbitrary combinations of these modals and quasi-modals are available.There are some combinations actually used in English, as showed in Di Paolo (1989:197),Mishoe and Montgomery (1994: 9), and Feagin (1979:157). As varieties of English, theyusually are adopted in South Midland and Southern American. The research of doublemodals can be traced back to Labov’s (1972) study in which he believes that the firstmodal plays the role of adverb. Different from Labov, Di Paolo (1989) thinks that thedouble modal construction should be treated as a single lexical item. Besides,Mishoe(1994) studies the multimodal variation from the perspective of pragmatics.
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Chapter 3 Methodology and Data Collection........... 13
3.1 Methodology of the study.....13
3.2 Data collection....14
3.3 Research procedure......15
Chapter 4 Construction of WSD Model by FCA..... 18
4.1 Semantic categorization of be able to.....18
4.2 Construction of training and testing sets......... 19
4.3 Calculation and discretization of mutual information.......20
4.4 Syntactic features selection........... 24
4.5 Word sense disambiguation model of be able to......26
4.6 Analysis of attribute features.........31
Chapter 5 Research on Modal Co-occurrence of be able to...... 40
5.1 Introduction to modal co-occurrence of be able to...40
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