The semantics of the modal auxiliaries in English and Afrikaans : a contrastive analysis

Abstract

This study represents an attempt to make explicit, within a contrastive perspective, the various types of meaning which can be expressed by the modal auxiliary verbs of English and Afrikaans. Chapter 1 investigates the potential of contrastive analysis for application in the field of foreign-language teaching and it is found that this linguistic technique is of definite pedagogical relevance because negative learning transfer or interference, which results from differences between source and target languages, is a major cause of learner error. It is also noted here that generally speaking the most acceptable type of linguistic theory within which a contrastive analysis should be framed is one which recognises both surface and deeper levels of structure so that the surface forms in each language can be ultimately related to a common semantic base. The modal auxiliaries of the two languages were selected for study because of the high degree of formal similarity or congruence that obtains between the English and Afrikaans counterparts, a fact which can be expected to lead to a considerable amount of learning transfer. As the semantics of these forms is not always equivalent, however, some of this transfer is bound to be negative, i.e. error-generating. In Chapter 2 the syntactic and morphological characteristics of the English and Afrikaans forms are compared. Although, as Chapter 2 reveals, the modal auxiliaries constitute a fairly well-defined formal class in each language, they relate semantically to an extensive set of other expressions, all of which mark modality, a rather complex concept which may be broadly characterised as relating to qualifications on the truth-value of the basic proposition which a speaker expresses. In Chapter 3 various classifications of types of modality are discussed and a basic distinction is made between epistemic modality (qualification relates directly to the speaker's assessment of the factuality of the proposition expressed) and non-epistemic modality (qualifications relate more specifically to conditions on the process referred to). In both cases the 11 qualification" can be expressed as a kind of "possibility" or a kind of "necessity", and within the framework of our analysis modality is represented at the level of deep-semantic structure by POSS and NEC as higher abstract predicates linked to one another by a set of meaning postulates. The interpretation of these predicates depends on the kinds of arguments which accompany them in the semantic representation and these arguments are classified and labelled broadly in accordance with Fillmore's functionalsemantic definitions of "case". The modal abstract predicates take as arguments a predication which is labelled as a Goal and either an Agent or Instrument as a source. Unlike traditional "modal operators", then, they are two-place transitive-causative predicates and the basic structure of the modal content of sentences is seen to be something of the order of "x makes-possible/necessary y (pre di ca ti on)". . Representations of epistemic modality contain a further BELIEVE predicate as part of the Goal predication. Depending on the prelexical transformations that apply (e.g. whether the modality source is deleted or not) syntactically different modality markers are derived from the same basic semantic representation and so expressions such as John allows Fred ... ,Fred is allowed ... and Fred can ... are shown to be broadly synonymous. Our main concern here is not with the actual transformations but with the "semantic primitives" in terms of which different types of modality may be represented and related to one another. Using the framework outlined in Chapter 3, the semantics of the "possibility" and the "necessity" modal auxiliaries in each language is discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. Both non-oblique ("present") and oblique ("imperfect") forms are related to one another and to other modality markers. Chapter 6 deals briefly with negative forms of the modal auxiliaries before summarising the semantic similarities and contrasts between the congruent English and Afrikaans forms. It is found that in spite of considerable parallelism in the meaning-form relations expressed by the modal auxiliaries in the two languages, there are also a number of basic differences. The pedagogical implications and applications relating to this study, its findings and its approach, are reviewed briefly by way of conclusion.