2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Modals in Early Modern English
| Project/Area Number |
15520324
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
English linguistics
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| Research Institution | Shigakukan University |
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Principal Investigator |
NAKAYASU Minako Shigakukan University, Faculty of Humanities, Associate Professor, 人間関係学部, 助教授 (80217926)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2003 – 2005
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| Keywords | Early Modern English / modal / historical pragmatics / modality |
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| Research Abstract |
This research aims at describing and analysing the modals in Early Modern English from pragmatic points of view to shed light on how the speaker was involved in the language, particularly in this grammatical category, at this stage of historical development.
Several attempts have been made to analyse the pragmatic aspects of modals in historical data. Micropragmatic aspects such as speech acts seem relatively accessible to historical researchers. The present research steps further into macropragmatic dimensions of language use, where previous studies on modals have not explored yet : for example, politeness, dialogue and discourse analysis.
First, this research contributes to the interface between philology and linguistics of a harmony of evidence and theory. Second, it helps to remedy the inadequacies of historical pragmatics, introducing the clear-cut distinctions among syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Third, by narrowing the scope of the corpus at the expense of diachronic and extensive analysis, it succeeds in conducting a detailed variationist analysis of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Fourth, this research explores the macropragmatic dimensions of language use such as politeness, dialogue and discourse analysis with reference to the historical research of modals. Fifth, the present work attempts a discourse-pragmatic explanation of the alternation among modals, which previous studies ascribed simply to variation. Sixth, it deals with contracted forms as well, which helps to give a more faithful picture of the modals at this stage of historical development. Finally, although taking the modals at a target of study, this research can also be a rigorous attempt to analyse the dynamics of communication.
The historical study of modals will certainly clarify how people communicated in the past. Further analysis of their social and cognitive aspects will shed light on unexplored areas of language use.
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