Subordinating Modalities: A Quantitative Analysis of Syntactically Dependent Modal Verb Constructions by Pascal HohausEnglish | PDF | 2020 | 296 Pages | ISBN : 3476056422 | 3.35 MB
This study is concerned with the use of the English modals (may, might, can, could, shall, should, will, would and must) in adverbial, relative complement clauses. It employs synchronic data from the British National Corpus and quantitative methods to investigate similarities and differences between the core modals, as well as modal-specific preferences in subordinate clauses. The main finding is that modal verbs in subordinate clauses may be conceived of as meso-constructions and that they qualify as micro-constructions once further syntagmatic features are considered.