Modal Sequences in Chinese Senior School Students’ English Compositions

DOI

10.2991/icssr-13.2013.106How to use a DOI?

Keywords

modal sequence;overuse and underuse; deontic and epistemic modality; Chinese senior school students

Abstract

This study examines the characteristics of modal sequences used in ST2 from CLEC ,with A Level from LOCNESS as a reference corpus. Main findings reveals: Firstly, modal sequences led by can, will and must are overused while those constructed by could, would and should are underused. Secondly, Chinese senior school students tend to overuse personal pronouns as subjects before modal verbs,and overuse verbs with unmarked aspect and voice after , making it rather difficult for students to express relatively complex modal meaning. Consequently, they overuse deontic modality and underuse epistemic modality , making their English comparatively strong on narrative and short on evaluation of their statements.

Copyright

© 2013, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shaoyun Long
PY  - 2013/07
DA  - 2013/07
TI  - Modal Sequences in Chinese Senior School Students’ English Compositions
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Science and Social Research (ICSSR 2013)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 454
EP  - 457
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icssr-13.2013.106
DO  - 10.2991/icssr-13.2013.106
ID  - Long2013/07
ER  -