Modality and the V wh pattern (original) (raw)

"Modality and the V wh pattern Much research in Corpus Linguistics has emphasised the relationship between form and meaning and that there is a danger in assuming that all forms of a lemma will have similar behaviour (Sinclair 1991, 2004). Another important strand in research is phraseology, exemplified by Hunston & Francis’s Pattern Grammar (e.g. Francis et al, 1996), which aims to produce more accurate descriptions of English as well as provide useful information to learners of the language. However, Pattern Grammar groups verbs by lemma rather than word form, and does not indicate the size of the attraction between a particular word and its complementation pattern. Further work from Hunston (2003) has shown that different forms of a lemma attract particular complementation patterns to different extents. This presentation reports on initial investigations into Hunston’s (2010) hypothesis that verbs governing wh-clauses also attract modal and modal-like language in the form of modal auxiliaries and modal-like expressions. It will also demonstrate the methodology used, which involved carrying out searches using the CQP-edition of BNCweb (Hoffman & Evert, 2008). References Francis, G., Hunston, S. and Manning, E. 1996. Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins. Hoffman, S. & Evert, S. 2008. BNCweb (CQP-Edition). Online resource. Available at [http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/\] (Accessed 5/10/2010) Hunston, S. 2003. “Lexis, wordform and complementation pattern: a corpus study”. Functions of Language 10: 31-60. Hunston, S. 2010. Corpus approaches to evaluation: Phraseology and evaluative language. New York/London: Routledge Sincair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP. Sinclair, J. 2004. Trust the text. London: Routledge. "