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Chapter   One   Introduction  

1.1 Research Background 
In  the  past  few  decades,  modal  verbs  in  English  have  been  extensively researched  and  described  (e.g.  Perkins,  1983;  Coates,  1983;  Mitchell,  1988;  Palmer, 1990;  Halliday,  1994;  Mindt,  1995;  Kennedy,  2002).  It  is  well  known  that  modal verbs have a different set of behaviors from other verbs. In spite of their simple forms, modal verbs appear always complicated to be explained in semantics, pragmatics and other linguistic subfields. They cover a range of meanings in different circumstances. Halliday (1994: 357-358), starting his explanation from functions rather than the word forms  that  realize  them,  systematizes  these  functions  into  ‘probability’,  ‘usuality’, ‘obligation’  and  ‘inclination’  and  further  into  three  degrees:  ‘high’, ‘median’,  and ‘low’.  Palmer  (1974)  classifies  modal  meaning  into  ‘epistemic’,  ‘deontic’  and ‘dynamic’. Quirk et al. (1972), taking as their starting point each modal verb and its different  uses,  use  the  terms  ‘ability’,  ‘permission’,  ‘possibility’,  ‘volition’, ‘obligation’,  ‘probability’  and  ‘logical  necessity’.  Papagragou  (2000)  concludes  the meanings  of  modal  verbs  relying  on  their  contexts  in  the  view  of  semantics  and pragmatics. Bartlett (2004) analyzes the role of modal verbs in the critical discourse.   With  the development  of  applied  linguistics and  empirical  linguistics, more  and more studies on modal verbs have been conducted with the guidance of corpora (e.g. Leech,  1971;  Biber  et  al.,  1999;  Aijmer,  2002;  Thompson,  2002;  Neff  et  al.,  2003; Cornillie,  2009).  Their  studies  of  modals  mainly  involve  the  modal  verbs’  use  and semantics,  their  frequency  and  the  change  of  semantic  domains,  and  the  comparison of  certain  modals  in  different  registers.  The  development  of  the  corpus  also contributes  to  empirical  studies  concerning  modal  verbs,  particularly  the  contrastive studies  of  the use  of  modals  between  native  English  speakers  and  EFL  learners  (e.g. Kennedy, 2000; Aijmer, 2002; Neff et al., 2003; Hinkel, 2009).  
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1.2 Objectives and Research Questions   
Biber  et  al  (2000:  73)  classifies  modal  verbs  according  to  their  practical  use across  various  registers  based  on  Longman  Spoken  and  Written  English  Corpus.  In terms of frequency, there are nine central mod本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。