Abstract
The polysemous phenomenon exposes the diversity of meanings within the same lexeme, English modals auxiliaries have more than one interrelated meanings (i.e. they are polysemous). This paper describes three meanings of CAN (plus its derived form COULD) : possibility, ability and permission. The flexibility of meanings in CAN/COULD has been applied on English journals in different fields (i.e. politics, literary criticism, science-tech, sport and health).The paper concludes that the meaning of CAN/COULD denotes possibility is more frequent in the Science-Tech than in the other fields.
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