Week 6

💛💚 Modal Auxiliary in British English: A Corpus-Based Study of Modality Through British National Corpus 💚💛

👀 The British National Corpus web-based program (BNCweb)

👉 BNCweb is a constructive device to offer fresh perspective of each modal verb in both realistic situation and discursive practice.

👉 Objectives 
   
BNCweb will be specifically applied through chosen modal verb in order to:

1. Shed some light on modal verb of which meanings are difficult to make distinction on theoretical background.
2. Affirm that modalities can be interchangeable due to different contexts, such as gender, type of data, perceived level of difficulty and etc.

👉 Methods
    Three modal verbs ("should", "have to" and "must") will be scrutinized by available functions ("distribution", "collocation" and "concordance") via BNCweb in order to offer empirical information, such as grammatical usage and discursive practice, of modalities in British context. Details of methodology in each function will be subsequently explained in results and discussion section.