Review and data mining of linguistic studies of English modal verbs

Abstract

Modal verbs express modality, and modality is concerned with the status of the proposition that describes an event, it also expresses the opinion and attitude of a speaker toward the proposition of an utterance. Since modalities are directly related to the objective world, subjective world, and language use, they have been a hot topic of philosophers, logicians and linguists. Philosophers concern with the relations between the objective world and the true/false values of the modality; logicians are interested in the relations among the possibility, necessity and the objective world; and linguists pay attention to the modality category, sense category, function, recognition, and application of modal verbs. In recent years, the linguistic studies of modal verbs have extended from general linguistic studies to computational linguistic studies. Since modal verbs are a complex semantic system and they are often indeterminate in senses, they have been a tough issue in linguistic studies and have attracted great attention. To clarify the status of the previous linguistic studies of modal verbs and reveal the characteristics of the studies will be of great significance for the further study. Therefore, this article will focus on the review of the previous linguistic studies of English modal verbs and the data mining of the characteristics of the previous studies, and based on the summary of the previous studies, give suggestions for the further study of the English modal verbs.