Động từ trạng thái và tình thái trong các bài báo kinh tế tiếng Anh

Table 1 shows the distribution of modal verbs in economic research articles from the corpus by process and distinguishes between active and passive where appropriate.. Table 1: Distri[r]

1 INTRODUCTION

Modality and transitivity has been the subject of linguistic studies and research Modal expressions allow us to talk about a certain state of affair that may never occur in the actual world Particularly, modality is

a facet of illocutionary force, signaled by grammatical devices that expresses (i) the illocutionary point or general intent of a speaker or (ii) a speaker’s degree

of commitment to the expressed proposition’s believability, obligatory, desirability, or reality In the linguistics literature, it is widely acknowledged that modal expressions may be used to communicate

two great clusters of meanings: (i) epistemic modal

meanings dealing with the possibility or necessity

of an inference drawn from available evidence, and

(ii) deontic modal meanings concerning with the

necessity or possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents, e.g obligation and permission (Lyons, 1977; Palmer, 1986, 1990) The paper attempts

to answer the following questions: (1) Are modal verbs or non-modals used in economic text more passive or active? (2) Which kind of modal verbs are frequently used in mental process? And (3) Is there any relationship between transitivity and modality? The study is based on a corpus of research articles drawn from English economic field The corpus is

made up of 15 economic research articles from The

Economic Journal (5 articles); Journal of Economic Issues (3 articles); Quarterly Journal of Business and

ĐỘNG TỪ TRẠNG THÁI

VÀ TÌNH THÁI

TRONG CÁC BÀI BÁO

KINH TẾ TIẾNG ANH

PHẠM THỊ THANH THÙY

Đại học Kinh tế Quốc dân

TÓM TẮT

Trong lĩnh vực ngôn ngữ học, “nghĩa tình thái” là

một thuật ngữ liên quan đến thái độ của người

nói đối với những gì đang được nói Động từ trạng

thái là một nhóm động từ đưa ra yêu cầu hoặc đề

xuất trong một trường hợp nhất định Nghĩa tình

thái và động từ trạng thái trong các văn bản kinh

tế đại diện cho một lĩnh vực nghiên cứu nhỏ về

khả năng ngữ dụng học (khả năng thực tế) Phần

lớn sự chú ý tập trung vào lý thuyết, tập trung

vào các ví dụ trực quan và vào các ví dụ từ những

ngữ cảnh thực tế Do đó, bài viết này sẽ xem

xét các khái niệm trong một số chiến lược rộng

hơn cho việc thay đổi lực ngôn trung dựa trên

sự phân tích nguồn đáng tin cậy từ các bài báo

nghiên cứu kinh tế Theo đó, bài viết này cố gắng

nghiên cứu xa hơn về biểu hiện phương thức và

động từ tình thái bằng cách tập trung vào phân

tích các phát ngôn tình thái và động từ trạng thái

sử dụng trong các văn bản kinh tế được lựa chọn

Bài viết này dựa trên nghiên cứu 15 bài báo kinh

tế tiếng Anh Thông tin trong 15 bài báo kinh tế

tiếng Anh bao gồm toàn bộ bài báo không tính

phần tóm tắt vì tác giả cho rằng ngôn ngữ của

phần tóm lược thuộc một thể loại khác so với các

phần còn lại trong một bài báo khoa học

Từ khóa: bài báo nghiên cứu kinh tế, động từ

khuyết thiếu, động từ trạng thái, tình thái

Economics (2 articles); The American Economic Review

(3 articles); Australian Economic (2 articles)

Only articles written by native speakers are chosen

in order to avoid possible interference from other

languages The articles which make up the corpus

relate to the macro and micro-economics issues

Based on the structure of the active English verb:

(modality) (perfect aspect) (progressive aspect)

tense

in which brackets indicate optional elements, all

verbs which fit into the above modality slot are

chosen as modal verbs The study excludes ought,

which requires the inclusion of the particle to, and

have to, which, in any case, has syntactic features

which distinguish it from the modal verbs

2 REVIEW OF LITERATURE

2.1 Transitivity

Halliday’s (1970) way of classifying processes

instructively shows his balancing the plausible with the

technical as well as the semantic with the grammatical

Mental processes have the principal subtypes of

perception (“seeing, hearing”, etc.), affection (“liking,

fearing”, etc.), and cognition (“thinking, knowing,

understanding”, etc.) Meanwhile, material processes

are divided into dispositive (“doing to”) and creative

(“bringing about”), each of which may be either

concrete or abstract

According to Halliday, every language accommodates

in its grammar a number of distinct ways of being and

English has intensive (i.e., ‘a relation of sameness’) (as

in “Tony is the leader”), circumstantial (as in “the fair is

on a Thursday”), and possessive (as in “Kate has a car”)

Each of these three comes in two modes: attributive

which has the functions of ‘attribute and carrier’ (as in

“Sarah is wise”), and identifying which has identified

and identifier (as in “tomorrow is the tenth”) Only

identifying clauses are reversible and have a passive

(as in “Tony plays the leader” and “the leader is played

by Tony”); but attributives do not (as in “the fair lasts all

day” but not “all day is lasted by the fair”), because an

attribute is not a participant and so cannot become a

subject of a sentence

Since there are indefinitely many ways of drawing lines

on purely semantic grounds, we must inquire which have systematic repercussions in the grammar We see

a good illustration in the criteria to show why mental processes (i.e ‘sensing’) and material processes (i.e

‘doing’) constitute distinct grammatical categories

‘Mental process’ is distinct from ‘material process’ in: (a) having as ‘participants’ a ‘human sensor’ endowed

with consciousness and a ‘Phenomenon’ (as in “I like

the quiet”), which cannot be equated with Actor and

Goal in a material process (as in “the lion caught the

tourist”); (b) being ‘representable’ as two-way or

‘bi-directional’ (as in “Mary liked the gift” versus “the gift

pleased Mary”); (c) being a ‘Fact’ or a representation

ready packaged, (as in “Jane saw that the stars had

come out”) as well as ‘a Thing’, or ‘a phenomenon of

our experience’ (as in “Jane saw the stars”); and (d) having as unmarked simple present tense (as in “I see

the stars”), whereas the material process has ‘present

in present’ (as in “they are building a house”).

2.2 Modality

From various points of view, despite an enormous amount of work done on the analysis of modality in languages, it is still not easy to identify what modality actually means (Palmer, 1986)

According to Quirk et al (1972), modality is used

as a cover term for different types of modification the speaker can express towards a state of affairs contained in the proposition In this usage, it is identified with the speaker’s comment or evaluation

on the representational content of the utterance

“Attitude” and “opinion” in this sense have nothing to

do with the emotional state that a person undergoes such as “like”, “love”, “hate”… Moreover, modality excludes factual evaluation from its domain Linguistic

discussions witness three kinds of modality: epistemic,

deontic and dynamic Epistemic modality deals with

the degree of the speaker’s commitment to the truth

of the proposition expressed and thus indicates some

degree of certainty (as in “He must know the answer of

the question”) or uncertainty (as in “He might know the answer of the question”).

Deontic modality is concerned with the necessity or possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents and thus mainly covers such notions as

obligation (e.g “You must take care of the child until

31 st Dec.”) and permission (e.g “You may check in

books for 2 weeks)

According to Von Wright (1951), dynamic modality is

introduced for cases where circumstances in the real

world make possible or necessary the actualization of

a state of affairs Dynamic modality includes two

sub-categories: subject-oriented, where the circumstances

are characteristics of the subject (as in “She can’t think

on her own”); and neutral, where the circumstances

are general conditions holding in the world (as in

“that career might be the most wanted job in the next

few years”) However, dynamic modality is not as clear

as it seems not to relate to the speaker Therefore,

linguists always mention to two broad kinds of

modality only: epistemic and deontic, and many of

them use “root modality” or “non-epistemic” modality

as a term covering both deontic and dynamic cases

(Coates, 1983)

3 MODALITY AND TRANSITIVITY IN ENGLISH

ECONOMIC RESEARCH ARTICLES

Data from the corpus show that while 31% of finite

verbs are passive, 41% of modal verbs occur in the

passive form Based on a simple transitivity network

introduced by Berry (1975) and Halliday (1985),

passivization and transitivity are considered

In economic research articles, all processes are either

mental or relational Material processes are either

unrestricted or restricted In other word, the number

of inherent participants is fixed (restricted) or not

(unrestricted) Unrestricted processes may occur

with two participants, and thus be causative: (1)…

corporate insiders must promote risk-taking decisions

to capitalize or, with a single participant, in which

case they are non-causative: (2)… petrol price will

similarly increase Restricted processes may be

restricted to a single participant, and thus be middle:

(3) When we use the three years at the same time, N in

that model can be bigger than the N of each year.

Where restricted processes are restricted to two

participants (effective process), both participants may

be expressed giving the transitive process: (4) … they

[insiders] can create an adversarial relationship among

partners…or only one participant may be expressed

giving the intransitive process: (5) A negative market

perception (reaction) may not then increase in the firm’s systematic risk level.

Relation processes are either attributive, where a qualitative attribute is assigned to the subject: (6)

… increasing price in… may be risky…or identifying,

where the process serves to define the identity of the

subject: (7)…both financial and non-financial private

benefits of control… which may create incentives for corporate insiders…

Only four positions in the network introduced by Halliday (1985) accept a selection between active and passive voice; they are the causative, transitive, mental, and identifying processes Table 1 shows the distribution of modal verbs in economic research articles from the corpus by process and distinguishes between active and passive where appropriate

Table 1: Distribution by process and active, passive

voice (data from writer’s research)

Processes and Voices Number of

modal verbs Frequency

Causative ActivePassive 33 1%1% Non-causative 9 4% Middle 17 7% Transitive ActivePassive 2126 11%9% Intransitive 2 1% Mental ActivePassive 3472 14%29% Attributive 49 20% Identifying ActivePassive 142 6%1% From the table 1, it is seen that mental process accounts for the largest number of cases (106 or 43%), followed by the material (81 or 34%) Relational process takes up 65 cases (26%) As has been said, 41% of the modal examples occur in the passive form However, the result shown in the study expresses a misleading, in the sense that in four of the process types (non-causative, middle, intransitive and attributive) the active/passive choice is not available These are processes occurring uniquely in the active form; no passive correlate exists Of the other types, causative has few examples, but those that do occur

are evenly divided between active and passive The transitive cases are also fairly evenly divided, with a slight bias towards passive (55%) The identifying cases are not many but are more so than causative Passive is rare in this case with only 12% of the cases

From the results, there seems to be some slight correlation between modality and mental process: 42% of the modal verbs in the corpus are mental processes, compared with 33% material and 25% relational processes

In the material process category, active and passive examples seem equally probable; in the mental process category, there seems to be a strong tendency towards the passive On the other hand, passive seems extremely rare in the relational process

It is reasonable that there are some links between modality and mental process According to Halliday (1985), mental process deal with the human appreciation of the world, it may be well that this is a situation where the normative economists tend to hedge their bets, leaving themselves an escape route rather than making unqualified statements The qualification provided by the modal would then allow the readers to follow the line

of reasoning suggested McCloskey (1985) has shown that when talking about the supposed errors of others, normative economists tend to do so in a non-specific way when speaking in a formal situation, as opposed

to the informal situations where they tend to be much more specific and assertive Therefore, it would seem reasonable that such a formal situation as in research articles will lead economists to be less assertive to hedge their bets, on points that might be open to disagreement

Table 2 indicates the distribution of the various modal verbs in the corpus occurring in mental processes

Table 2: Distribution of modal verbs in mental processes (data from writer’s research)

Modal

Number Frequency Number Frequency Number Frequency Will 3 9% 5 7% 8 8%

Would 7 21% 3 4% 10 10%

Shall - - -

-Should 3 9% 3 4% 6 6%

Can 15 42% 34 47% 49 46%

Could 1 3% 4 6% 5 5%

May 4 12% 15 21% 19 18%

Might - - 6 8% 6 6%

Must 1 3% 2 3% 3 3%

Table 3 shows the frequency of the various modal verbs by process and by voice The modal verbs are ordered according to their high frequency

Table 3: The distribution of the various modal verbs by process and by voice (data from writer’s research)

Active Passive Active Passive Active Passive Can 6 7 15 34 4

-May 10 5 4 15 20 1

Would 12 4 7 3 15 1

Will 11 1 3 5 7

-Should 1 4 3 3 8

-Could 6 4 1 4 2

-Must 7 2 1 2 4

-Might - 1 - 6 3

-The above tables indicate that can makes up almost half of the modal verbs occurring This is true for both the active and passive cases, with 42% and 47% respectively in mental processes May is also accounts for a high ratio These two modal verbs can and may will further be considered in the next section.

3.1 Mental process and passive May and Can

Huddleston (1971) claims that there are six uses of the epistemic may as follow:

1 Qualified generalization: x is true for at least some members of the group but not necessarily any particular individual

2 Exhaustive disjunction: x is at least one of the attributes proposed

3 Uncertainty: the truth of x is not certain (i.e possibility)

4 Concession: whether x is true or not, y is the case

5 Legitimacy: x is legitimate, valid

6 Ability: people are able to do x

The epistemic can has the same uses as may with the exclusion of the fourth use: concession Besides, Huddleston seems to imply that there is little difference between may and can Palmer (1974) when mentioning English verbs also shares the same idea links can to the notion of non-assertion Of the notions suggested by

Huddleston (1971), those of the uncertainly/possibility, legitimacy and ability seem to cover all of the examples found in the sample

The examples of passive can in the mental process are never of a deontic type All of the examples can be

classified as epistemic in some forms To the extent that these can be divided into an ability type and a

possibility type For example: (8) Hence, it can be argued that the nature of and changes in corporate governance

have potential implications for the firm’s riskiness; (9) The differences in securities underwritten by commercial banks (or their affiliates) can be neglected.

However, a considerable number of the examples are not easily classified as being one rather than the other, and seem to combine aspects of both possible interpretations, or indeed to be neutral as to which one should

be selected

The examples of passive, may in the mental process are also exclusively of the epistemic type, i.e indicating some form of possibility (10)… the present work may be considered an extension of Walter’s analysis…

Here the majority of the cases of passive may in mental process (15 out of 17 cases) are examples of the legitimacy use: (11)… without controlling for other factors that will affect this spread, no strong conclusions may be drawn from

these univariate results.

The ability category of may can also be seen in the economic research articles (here again some cases are not

easy to categorize)

To the extent that can and may cover similar semantic

areas in similar proportions, it might seem that the

“virtually no difference” approach is justified, and it

is true that in many cases substituting may for can

or vice versa would make “virtually” no difference

However, in this example, “can” does not lend

themselves to this ploy (12)… it can be shown that

the procedure… is reasonable… The substitution of

may in example (13)… in the United States, the capital

market needs of smaller firms may be ignored …places

the reasonableness much more in the domain of

possibility This seems to go against Palmer’s use of

non-assertion as a distinguishing feature of epistemic

can Both may and can express a procedure which

is considered legitimate However, in the case of

can, this legitimacy is considered to be the only one

available in the present state of our knowledge, and it

is used until it is shown to be less adequate than some

other procedures This interpretation is supported

by the fact that in many cases there seems to be

little difference, or at least only marginal difference,

between the use of can and a non-modal sentence.

3.2 Mental Process and Active May and Can

Mental process, by definition, typically requires an

intelligent agent Economic discourse tends to avoid

the use of human agent subjects It might expect then

that active mental process would be rare in this type

of document As far as may is concerned, this is true In

addition, example with human subject is rarely found

Subject in most of the cases might be called “untypical

animacy” (the term used by Berry (1975)); that is, in this

case, an inanimate subject occurring where the process

would normally require an animate one For example,

(14) This firm-specific error can control for unobservable firm

effects not captured in the OLS model; (15) According to our

hypothesis, a conflict of interest may exist when a firm with a

loan outstanding issues a security underwritten by the bank…

There is a rather higher number of examples of active

can in the mental process Furthermore, one might

add here that the pronoun we as subject, which

constitutes an unusually high concentration for this

type of discourse, occurs quite often Most of the

examples with the pronoun we as subject express

legitimacy: (16) We can now state…that… there is no

evidence…; (17) The second alternative… not only can

account for the increased productivity…

While the other examples express ability, for example:

(18)…lacking suitable data we cannot quantify the loss

from that economic decision.

Some examples are neutral as to an ability or

legitimacy interpretation as (19) We can check

whether the loss Profile B is plausible…; (20) We may conduct further tests to clarify the effects of time on the perception of a conflict of interest.

The above corpus examples then present two basic

differences between active may and active can in mental process Firstly, may, but not can, occurs

more frequently with untypical animacy; whereas

may expresses primarily uncertainty and secondarily

legitimacy, can expresses primarily legitimacy and

secondarily ability The numbers are too small to warrant extrapolation, but it would be interesting to see if these results are confirmed in a larger sample

4 CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the study presents some observations concerning transitivity and modality in economic research articles It can be concluded that there is a series of relationships between processes (transitivity) and modality These are manifested in the form of tendencies, in some cases particularly strong, for particular processes to have strong collocations with specific forms of modal choice in economic writing Transitivity is then a significant parameter in the analysis of modality in economic research articles Because of the scope of a seminar topic, the study is only an extrapolative result found for transitivity and modality in a small numbers of the sample It would

be interesting to see whether the tendencies found here are corroborated in a larger sample Also, further research on the other categories of transitivity and modality would be useful./

References:

1 Berry, M (1975), Introduction to Systemic Linguistics,

Structures and Systems, 1 U.K: Batsford

2 Coats, J (1983), The Semantics of the Modal

Auxiliaries London and Canberra: Croom Helm.

3 Halliday, M.A.K (1970), Functional diversity in

TRANSITIVITY AND MODALITY IN ENGLISH ECONOMIC RESEARCH ARTICLES

PHAM THI THANH THUY Abstract: In the linguistics literature, modality is a semantic term concerning the speaker’s attitude

toward what is being said Meanwhile, transitivity is the number of objects a verb requires or takes

in a given instance Much of the attracted attention has been on theoretical nature, and intuitive and de-contextualized examples The paper, therefore, helps situate the concept within wider strategies for modifying illocutionary force basing on an analysis of authentic sources from economic research articles Accordingly, the study attempts to further advance research on modal expressions and transitivity by focusing on analyzing modal verbs and transitivity used in selected economic texts The study is based on a corpus of 15 economic research articles drawn from English economic field The corpus contains the whole of the text of the articles, excluding the abstract since the language of an abstract is a register in itself, so it is not like an academic article

Keywords: economic research articles, modal verb, transitivity, modality

Ngày nhận: 18/7/2016 Ngày phản biện: 02/9/2016 Ngày duyệt đăng: 20/9/2016

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