Can is perceived to be one of the most commonly used English modal auxiliary verbs,especially in spoken English in *** Chinese modal verb neng(能) is ranked as the second most frequently used Chinese modal auxiliary,r...
Can is perceived to be one of the most commonly used English modal auxiliary verbs,especially in spoken English in *** Chinese modal verb neng(能) is ranked as the second most frequently used Chinese modal auxiliary,right after yao (要) according to China’s official statistics dated 2004(Li 2009).Given the grammatical and semantic complexity associated with them,it seems worthwhile to investigate the various conditions that shape the use of can and *** paper therefore sets out to build on Huddleston’s grammatical semantic approach to examine the modality of can in comparison and contrast with neng. The study first describes the epistemic,deontic and dynamic modality of can through the analysis of its performance in declaratives,interrogatives and *** then discusses the modality of neng in the three modality domains by comparing and contrasting it with that of can. This will enable us to locate the commonalities between these two modal verbs and to affirm the attempt of using can and neng interchangeably in the case of *** will be made to examine their differences and identify the situations in which neng cannot be translated as can and vice versa.
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