| Summary: | 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. === Linguistics and Modern Languages
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