MUST情态语义及其句法特征的多维历时研究

A Multi-dimensional Diachronic Study of the Modal Meanings and Syntactic Features of MUST

英语情态动词一直是语言学研究的热点之一,针对情态动词的历时研究有助于揭示其在特定时间段内的发展轨迹。本研究基于时间跨度近半世纪的布朗家族语料库,以情态动词MUST为例,考察了其使用频率、语义分布及其句法特征在近五十年内的变迁过程。研究发现,MUST的使用频数在近五十年内急剧下降,其义务情态比重下降,认识情态比重上升,呈现出主观化的演变趋势;其常用的句法特征也有明显变化,呈现出口语化的发展趋势。这些变化在不同语体和地域维度中的变异也较大。

English modal verbs have always been a hot spot of linguistic researches. The diachronic studies of toodal verbs help to reveal their developing trajectories within a specific period. By utilizing the Brown Family Corpora, this study investigated the changing process of the modal verb MUST in the past fifty years, including its frequency, meaning distribution and syntactic features. The results show sharp declines of its frequency and its deontic proportion, but a rise of its epistemic proportion, which reflects the subjectification tendency. The syntactic features also change significantly, showing the colloquialization tendency. All these changes varied greatly in different stylis- tic and dialectal dimensions.