Functional Plurality of Language in Contextualised Discourse. Eighth Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English. Conference Proceedings. Brno, 12–13 September 2019

Kapitola

Modal verbs in English essays written by Czech secondary-school students

Věra Sládková
Rok vydání: 2020

https://doi.org/10.5817/CZ.MUNI.P210-9767-2020-10
Modal verbs in English essays written by Czech secondary-school students pdf, 175KB

Abstrakt

This paper presents the findings of a frequency analysis of modal verbs and their complementation in 390 English school-leaving essays written by Czech secondary-school students in a high-stakes B1 level exam. These constitute a learner corpus, CZEMATELC 2017. The study reveals a very high proportion of correct complementation patterns, but predominantly with lexical verbs at A1 and A2 CEFR levels. The most frequent errors are the complementation of modal verbs by past-tense forms of lexical verbs and the absence of complementation.

Klíčová slova

central modals, quasi-modals, lexical verbs, learner corpus, error patterns

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