“Well, I think that my argument is…,” or modality in a learner corpus of English

• Autores: Leanne Bartley, Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio
• Localización: Revista española de lingüística aplicada, ISSN 0213-2028, Vol. 29, Vol. 1, 2016, págs. 1-29
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1075/resla.29.1.01bar
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • Linguistic modality is the expression of the speaker’s subjectivity including possibility, probability, necessity, obligation, permission, prohibition, and desire. This paper analyses a learner English corpus collected at two Spanish universities, paying special attention to which linguistic devices (e.g., modal verbs, adjectives, adverbs or nouns) English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students make use of when providing for and against arguments in their assignments. Applying a corpus-based methodology not only enabled comparisons to be made with other native and non-native data but also facilitated both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The findings show remarkable similarities and differences, and leave several issues at stake: the relationship between the degree of assertiveness of a text and (1) the student’s gender, (2) their command of the Foreign Language (FL), and (3) their familiarity with the genre they are expected to write in.

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