Polysemic Study on English Modals from Image Schemas

        It has a very long history in the study of the meaning of modal verbs, especially the discussion about the logic relationships of possibility and necessity which can be traced back as early as Aristotle’s time. Since then, with the vigorous development of linguistics, the study of the meanings of English modal verbs has become one of the concerns of linguistics. Meanwhile, a growing number of scholars at home and abroad have taken great interest in the study of the modality. 

    From the perspectives of philosophy, logic, cognition, and linguistics, scholars have conducted the researches on the English modality in such an extensive and profound way.People are increasingly paying attention to the meaning of modality rather than just from the angle of the logic. It fits well with the direction development of linguistic research:from the original study of the form and the logic to today’s concern about the development of language meaning and language use in specific contexts. Hence, linguists from different angles on the research of modality have produced different viewpoints.In the linguistic research, it has been a heated topic for decades in the traditional syntax, semantics and pragmatics to analyze and study the multiple meaning items from different perspectives on the meaning of modal verbs. 

     Researchers of traditional grammar, semantics, pragmatics and so on have studied the polysemic meanings of English modal verbs from different perspectives in a deep way to different degrees, among which includes Quirk’s traditional grammar research on the modality, Lyons’ semantics study, and Levinson’s study from the perspective of pragmatics etc. Based on the theory of image schemas, to be more specific, force schemas and the analysis of specific modals’ polysemy in cognitive semantics, the thesis is to vividly demonstrate the polysemy of for English modal verbs, and to reveal the relationship between the world of human experience and their inner world from the analysis of deontic meaning and epistemic meaning of English modal verbs as well as the metaphorical projection. 

     Cognitive linguists such as Talmy, Sweetser, Johnson, and Langacker have illustrated English modal verbs in the cognitive way including image schemas, domains, metaphor mapping, and dynamic evolution models, which enhance the understanding of the relationship between cognition and language.The design of the thesis has been planned in six chapters. The first chapter will state the purpose of the thesis with a brief review of the prevailing theories and the methods of the study in the thesis. The second chapter is going to illustrate the previous study such as traditional grammar study, semantics study and pragmatics, etc. on the polysemy of English modals, and put forward the limitation of the study. Hence, the new approach-cognitive linguistics with advantages will be applied to the analysis of the polysemic study of English modals in the thesis. In the third chapter the cognitive theoretical review will be taken in the study. To be more specific, the theory of image schemas and metaphorical mapping will be employed in the polysemic study. The force schemas will display the mental images for the different English modals of MUST, MAY, WILL, CAN, and SHALL according to their semantic occurrences.

     The metaphorical mapping will make explanations for the cognitive relationship between deontic and epistemic meanings among these English modals, which reveal the deep connection between human cognition and linguistic semantics. Chapter five will give detailed polysemic interpretation of English modals from force schemas supported by the demonstrations of specific examples, and the analysis of the close relationships between the deontic semantics and the epistemic semantics based on metaphorical mapping. The last chapter will end the body of the thesis with a smooth conclusion of the previous parts and some suggestions for later study in this field. 

     To summarize, the study regards the mental process as having special meaning to the meaning interpretation of English modality. The major contribution and significance of the study is to cognitively interpret the polysemy of English modality from the perspective of the force schemas. However, the application of force schema theory is still at the step of experiment to a certain extent. Therefore, the application of force schema to the analysis of English modality needs further improvement.