Vietnam National University, Hanoi University of Languages and international studies Faculty of post-graduate studies ---------------oo0oo-------------- Hoàng Thu Hiền Deontic modality in military english (in the text books of english campaign) Tính tình thái chức phận trong tiếng Anh quân sự Minor Program Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 602215 Hanoi, November, 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Vietnam National University, Hanoi University of Languages and international studies Faculty of post-graduate studies ---------------oo0oo-------------- Hoàng Thu Hiền Deontic modality in military english (in the text books of english campaign) Tính tình thái chức phận trong tiếng Anh quân sự Minor Program Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 602215 Supervisor: Dương Thị Thực Hanoi, November, 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTENTS PAGE NUMBER DECLARATIONS I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS II ABSTRACT III TABLE OF CONTENTS IV LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES VI PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 I. Rationale of the Study 1 I. Aims of the Study 3 I. Scope of the Study 3 I.
Significance of the Study 4 I. Design of the Study 4 PART II: DEVELOPMENT 5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5 1. An Overview on Modality 5 1. Definitions of Modality 5 1.
Types of Modality 6 1. An Overview on Deontic Modality 7 1. Uses of Deontic Modality 8 1. Ways of Expressing Deontic Modality 9 1.
By Modal Auxiliaries 10 1. Syntactic Features of Modal Auxiliaries 10 1. Semantic Features of Modal Auxiliaries 10 1. Modal Auxiliaries in Expressing Deontic Modality 11 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
By Others 15 CONTENTS PAGE NUMBER 1. General Characteristics of Military English 17 1. Some Characteristics of Campaign 1 and 2 19 1. Summary 19 CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY 20 2.
Data Analysis, Findings and Discussions 21 2. Deontic Modality in Military English 21 2. Deontic Modality through Modal Auxiliary Verbs 22 2. Deontic Meanings of Can 22 2.
Deontic Meanings of Could 23 2. Deontic Meanings of May 23 2. Deontic Meanings of Might 25 2. Deontic Meanings of Must 25 2.
Deontic Meanings of Should 26 2. Deontic Meanings of Will 27 2. Deontic Meanings of Would 28 2. Deontic Meanings of Shall 29 2.
Deontic Modality through Imperatives 30 2. Deontic Modality through some Modal Lexical Items 31 2. Summary 33 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART III: CONCLUSION 37 III. Pedagogical Implications 38 III.
Limitations of the Research and Suggestions for Further Research 40 REFERENCES 41 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1: Frequency and percentage of Deontic expressions in Military English Figure 1: Frequency and percentage of Deontic expressions in Military English LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART I: INTRODUCTION I. Rationale of the study No one denies the importance of English language in the present time as the global language. It is clear that English language has become more dominant around the world. In some countries, it is used as the mother tongue and in other countries it is considered as the second language.
This makes English widespread. On the other hand, English is the language of science and technology. There is no doubt that English is the language of communication between people of different cultures. It is also the language of computers that helps communicate with the people around the world through Internet technology and e-mail.
People who know English can deal with the Internet, which is regarded as information and communication revolution. Being aware of the importance of English, Vietnamese learners try to master it. A lot of Vietnamese people are learning English as the working language with foreiners. In recent years, English has become a compulsory subject at schools, colleges and universities in Vietnam.
During the process of learning English, Vietnamese learners of English tend to face with a lot of difficulties as English belongs to a quite different language family, the Indo- European language family, which is an infectional language. The word classes such as nouns and verbs usually change their forms to show grammatical categories. Besides, they meet with many difficulties in studying its grammar, its sound system and its vocabulary, as well. Among which its grammar plays an important role in the process of English learning.
Grammar is an essential element to build the language. Communication becomes difficult without grammatical uses. Therefore, undoubtedly, one‟s success in communicating in a foreign language partly depends on how to put words together according to certain grammar rules of the language. With ten- year teaching experience at Military Science Academy (MSA), the writer realizes that grammar, in general and modality, in particular plays an important part in teaching and learning English, especially Military English.
That‟s why the writer LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com attempts to study one of the difficult prolems facing Vietnamese learners of English, which is modality in English with the focus on Deontic modality in Military English. The issue of modalities is probably one of the basic philosophical issues and has been addressed by many philosophers at many times. The contemporary notion of modality is very broad. It covers notions like necessity or possible truth and falsity, knowledge, provability and many others.
The original philosophical issue deals with modalities concerning truth-values – necessity and possibility. In linguistics, modals are expressions broadly associated with notions of possibility and necessity. Modals have a wide variety of interpretations which depend not only upon the particular modal used, but also upon where the modal occurs in a sentence, the meaning of the sentence independent of the modal, the conversational context, and a variety of other factors. For example, the interpretation of an English sentence containing the modal 'must' can be that of a statement of inference or knowledge (roughly, epistemic) or a statement of how something ought to be (roughly, deontic).
The following pair of examples illustrates the interpretative differences: John didn't show up for work. He must be sick. John didn't show up for work. He must be fired.
The use of 'must' in the first sentence is interpreted as indicating a statement of reasoned conclusion: the speaker concludes John is sick, otherwise John would have shown up for work. In contrast, in the second sentence, 'must' is interpreted as a statement of how something ought/need to be: the speaker is saying that because John didn't show up for work, John ought to be fired. The use of a modal, particularly in cases like the first sentence above, contrasts subtly with not using a modal, as illustrated below: John must be sick. John is sick.
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com The use of the modal in John must be sick is interpreted as indicating that some process of reasoning was used to arrive at the conclusion that John is sick. The lack of the modal in John is sick tends to preclude such an interpretation, and is generally considered to be a statement of the fact (i., the speaker knows that John is sick). In other words, a speaker would typically not say John must be sick if the speaker knows that John is sick is true. In long teaching practice, the writer has known all the basic uses of the modal auxiliary verbs, but can‟t touch their more deep gradation, and then further to study them.
This time, the meaning and purpose of the study are to let more and more learners observe deontic functions of modal auxiliaries as well as imperatives and the other lexical items in English, particularly in Military English. Aims of the study The aims of this study are: To study the different ways of expressing Deontic Modality in Military English. To analyze the elements that have influences on Deontic Modality in Military English. To indicate the uses of deontic modality in Military English.
Research questions The following questions are proposed in the current research: What are the different ways to express deontic modality in Military English? In what circumstances is deontic modality used in Military English? This study, in turn, hopes to contribute to enriching pedagogical proposals for teaching Modality in Military English to English major students at the MSA (Military Science Academy, page 1). Scope of the study LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com The study is limited to investigating written deontic expressions in Military English expressed in the text books Campaign 1 and 2. This investigation is based on the manual corpus of 677 sentences possessing deontic meanings collected from the two text books Campaign 1 and 2. Also, to carry out this study, the writer has based on careful study, analysis and generalization on the material obtained from different sources.
Significance of the study The thesis hopes to contribute to the overall look at modality in general and deontic modality in Military English in particular. The findings of the study, as a result, will contribute to language teaching as well as learning Military English at MSA. Design of the study The present paper is organized in four main parts. The INTRODUCTION is devoted to presenting the statement of the problem, the aims of the study, the scope of the study, the significance of the study, the research questions and the organization of the study.
The DEVELOPMENT is subdivided into two chapters: CHAPTER 1 discusses the general theoretical background of the study and CHAPTER 2, the backbone of the thesis, comprises the methods of the study, data collection, analytical framework, data analysis, findings and discussion. The CONCLUSION demonstrates the conclusions of this piece of research, pedagogical implications, and suggestions for further studies. References are also included in this paper. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.
An Overview on Modality 1. Definitions of Modality During the last few decades, several approaches springing from various perspectives have tried to provide a systematic account of modality in English by defining the term as well as categorising modals in general. These have based their accounts on a number of criteria: formal/syntactic, semantic, distributional, functional, pragmatic, and/or cognitive. Bybee (1985) defines modality in broad terms by saying that modality is what the speaker is doing with the whole proposition.
Palmer (1986) offers the definition of modality as semantic information asssociated with the speaker‟s attitude or opinion about what is said. In the point of the fact, modality concerns the factual status of the proposition. Also modality is not to be confused with mood. Jaspers (1924) probably is one of the first linguists to hint at the difference between modality and mood.
He (1924:313) makes a very insightful remark: “Further it is important to speak of mood only if the attitude of mind is shown in the form of the verb: mood thus is a syntactic, not a notional category”. The bottom line, however, is that modality is some sort of a semantic issue as it reflects the speaker‟s attitude or knowledge about the factual status of a proposition but mood is a grammatical phenomenon in that this knowledge or attitude is expressed morphologically, i. by opposite forms of words in English, for instance. Of the three moods recognized by English grammarians, the indicative and subjective moods express epistemic modality because they are concerned with the factual status of the content of proposition.
The imperative, on the other hand, denotes deontic modality as it deals with obligation- someone has to do something. Jespersen‟s view of modality is also very interesting. Jespersen sees two kinds of modality: the first of which contains an element of will and the second contains no LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com element of will. This distinction now corresponds to what we call deontic and epistemic modality.
Searl‟s speech act theory can provide a useful framework for the discussion of modality. Assertives, for example, are described in terms of the speaker‟s belief or commitment to the truth of a proposition.