Abstract
Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.
Highlights
Leech’s [1] corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed drops in the usage of all modal verbs that he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society
Chinese allows for a chance to verify the hypothesis in a different language and in a critical period with both multiple high impact historical events and a couple of significant language reform movements
The changes in modal verb usages in Mandarin in the past 109 years can be generalized as a competition between high and low value modal verbs
Summary
Leech’s [1] corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed drops in the usage of all modal verbs that he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. There are continuing debates on the point-to-point sampling design on the choices of corpora Most crucially, this hypothesis has not been extended to any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. Chinese allows for a chance to verify the hypothesis in a different language (especially one with a very conservative writing system) and in a critical period with both multiple high impact historical events and a couple of significant language reform movements (the vernacular movement and the simplification of Chinese writing systems).
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