Certificate of originality

5. Design of the study

Part A is the introduction which presents rationales, literature review, aims, scope of the study as well as the methodology for the research.

Part B is the main part which consists of three chapters.

Chapter one is about the theoretical background for the research. This chapter is aimed at establishing the framework of investigation. It chiefly deals with modality and modal verbs in English and in Vietnamese.

Chapter two is focused on investigating the meanings expressed by can, may, must and on contrastive analysis of the meanings expressed by can, may, must and the Vietnamese equivalents cã thÓ, ph¶i.

Chapter three deals with the applicability of the study results to the teaching of can, may, must to Vietnamese learners of English. It discusses some challenges in teaching and learning English modals. It also puts forward some suggestions for the teaching of English modals.

The final part is the conclusion which presents a recapitulation of the study and provides possible concluding remarks and suggestions for further research.
Part B: Development

Chapter 1: Theoretical background

1.1. Concept of modality in English

1.1.1. Definition of modality

Modality is central to research done in many disciplines, but rarely receives unified treatment in logic, in (western) philosophy, or in linguistics. In modern logic, for example, one generally analyses a single semantic value for a modal verb such as can, may, or must in English or cã thÓ, cã lÏ or nªn in Vietnamese. As these verbs occur in different contexts and are sensitive to interaction with time and aspect markers, they can receive different values.

The modal value of a statement is the way, or ‘mode’, in which it is true or false: e.g. certainly so, currently so, necessarily so. In logic, modality usually means ‘logical modality’, that is the logical necessity or possibility of a statement’s truth or falsity.

Nevertheless, logic begins but does not end with the study of truth values. Within truth, there are modes of truth, ways of being true: necessary truth and contigent truth. When a proposition is true, we may say whether it could have been false. If so, then it is contigent true. If not, then it is necessarily true; it must be true; it could not have been false. Falsity has modes as well: a false proposition that could not have been true is impossible or necessarily false; one that could have been true is merely contigently false. The proposition ‘New York is a rich city’ is contigently true; the proposition that ‘Two and two is four’ is necessarily true; the proposition ‘Her husband is female’ is impossible, and the proposition that ‘Women don’t give births’ is contigently false.

In logic, modality is concerned with how what is said is related to the fact that rather than with what purpose, attitude or judgement a speaker has in uttering. It is because of this reason that modality in logic is considered objective modality.

While traditional logic has been more concerned with objective modality, which excludes speakers, modality in language seems to be essentially subjective, i.e. it refers to the speaker’s opinion or attitude. This is reasonable because in everyday conversation and in different contexts, all utterances show the purpose, attitude or assessment of the speaker.

Modality in language is, then, concerned with subjectiveness of an utterance. In subjective modality, speakers express the fact with their own intention or judgement. The subjectivity is seen in different aspects: speakers’ commitment toward the factuality of what is said, speakers’ judgement toward a proposition, whether it is positive or negative, advantageous or disadvantageous etc. It is modality that gives more meanings to utterances. Together with fast development of semantics and pragmatics, modality has received more linguists’ concerns.

Lyons (1977) says that modality is the speaker’s opinion or attitude towards ‘the proposition that the sentence expresses or the situation that the proposition describes.’

Palmer (1986) defines modality as semantic information associated with the speaker’s attitude or opinion about what is said.

According to Frawley (1992), modality semantically reflects a speaker’s attitude or degrees of awareness of the content of a proposition.

In Vietnam, for the past few years, modality has been the focus of many linguists and researchers such as Hoµng Phª, §ç H÷u Ch©u and others. Hoµng Träng PhiÕn broadly explains modality as a grammatical category which appears in all kinds of sentence.

From the definition of modality mentioned above, we can see that to some extent linguists have one thing in common seeing that modality describes the speaker’s attitude or judgement toward the proposition and not the proposition itself.

The notional content of modality highlights its association with entire statements. Modality concerns the factual status of information; it signals the relative actuality, validity, or believability of the content of an expression. Modality reflects the overall assertability of an expression and thus takes the entire proposition within its scope. In the utterance ‘It may be raining’, for example, the speaker is not committing himself wholeheartedly to the truth of the proposition. He is not making a categorical assertion, but rather modifying his commiment to some degree by expressing a judgement of the truth of the situation.

1.1.2. Types of modality

Types of modality in Halliday’s view.

Halliday’s view on types of modality could be summed up as follow.

“Polarity is the choice between positive and negative, as in is/ isn’t, do/ don’t.

However, the possibilities are not limited to a choice between yes and no. There are intermediate degress: various kinds of indeterminacy that fall in between, like “sometimes” or “maybe”. The intermediate degrees between the positive and negative poles, are known collectively as modality”. (Halliday, 1985: 85-86)

He further expresses the commodity exchanged & the speech function and the types of intermediacy in this chart

In a proposal, there are two kinds of intermediate possibilities: (1) in a command, the intermediate points represent degrees of obligation and (2) in an offer, they represent degrees of described duty.

However, the classification made by Sweetser and Palmer, in my opinion, seems the most acceptable for its clarity and generalization which can be applied to the linguistic study from different angles: semantic, logic and pragmatic. They are Epistemic & Deontic modality. Analyzing such a sentence as “He must be in his office”, we can see this may have two interpretations, depending on the modality assigned to the modal verb “must”.

In one sense, it means “I am certain that he is in his office” (By my reasoning and judgement). In another sense, it has the interpretation of “He is obliged to be in his office” (He has no choice but to be in his office). In the formal sense, the modal auxiliary “must” is epistemic and in the latter it is deontic.

Lyons (1977: 793) (in conjunction with other scholars) states: “Epistemic modality is concerned with matters of knowledge, belief” or “opinion rather than fact”. Palmer (1990:7) considers that epistemic modality in language is often, may be always, subjective in a way it is associated with the deduction of the speakers and not only simply interest in the subjective judgment in the light of reality.

And “Deontic modality is concerned with the necessity of possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents” (Lyons 1977: 823). By means of this, speakers intervene in or bring about changes in events.