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2 Regularity of sense combination of M1M2.....49
5.3 The function of modal co-occurrence of be able to...........54
5.4 The restrictive relations between the two modals.... 56

Chapter 5 Research on Modal Co-occurrence of be able to

In this thesis, be able to is chosen to be the representative of the second placequasi-modal, and primary modals and quasi-modals are collectively called modal verbs.So the research object modal co-occurrence of be able to points to the structure a modalverb + be able to.

5.1 Introduction to modal co-occurrence of be able to

In this section, the introduction to modal co-occurrence of be able to will beinvestigated, which contains two aspects: comparison with double modal constructionsand description of the syntactic features of modal co-occurrence of be able to.During the process of constructing the WSD model of be able, the high frequency ofmodal co-occurrence of be able to is inevitably being noticed. The structure of a modalverb + be able to attracts my attention to further investigation.As far as Standard English is concerned, modal verbs, precisely primary modal verbsdo not collocate with each other without interval, such as* must can, *can will, and*should must. Palmer (2001) points out that English modal verbs do not appearsimultaneously, such as the forms like *will can come, *may shall be. At the same time,there are some scholars study the co-occurrence of English modal verbs in specialty, andthey call this phenomenon double modal construction, short for DM structure in mostcases. Double modal construction refers to a syntactic construction in which two modalverbs occur consecutively within a single sentence. As varieties of English, they usuallyare mainly adopted in South Midland and Southern American.

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Conclusions

The accuracy of the WSD model of quasi-modal be able to is lower than the accuracyof primary modal verbs in the same condition of research method, which implies thatquasi-modal verbs are more difficult to be disambiguated. After the construction of WSDmodel of be able to with the help of FCA, valuable information is achieved. Rules areextracted from the WSD model that implies the influence of attribute features on the threesenses of be able to. Besides, rules in the same sense are similar, while rules in differentsenses tend to be disparate. It is found by analyzing the rules extracted that the threesenses of be able to are all influenced by the subject and verb collocated with them. Inaddition, they all have relations with the syntactic features of other senses. Compared withsemantic features, syntactic features have less influence on the senses. By analyzing thelayer distribution of attribute features, the distributive features of semantic and syntacticfeatures are concluded. Generally, the attribute features in the top layer have the characterof generalization; while attribute features in the bottom lay have the character ofinstantiation.
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