Cross-linguistic Study on the Distribution of the Modal Auxiliaries in a Learner Corpus

This paper investigated the distribution of modal auxiliaries in a corpus of essay written by learners of English. In particular, tokens of Modal auxiliaries are extracted from TOEFL11 corpus, which is a corpus of TOEFL essays written by different proficiency levels and by test-takers who are from 11 different countries. The number of essays is 11,000 for each language (that is, 121,000 in total), but the number differs in terms of the level of proficiency. In order to compare the distribution of the modal auxiliaries, relative frequency, rather than raw frequency is used. The paper examined the relative distribution of modal auxiliaries from the perspectives of L1 languages of the test-takers, proficiency level, and the prompt that the test-takers are instructed to write on. The results indicates similarities and differences in the distribution of modal auxiliaries. Among various modal auxiliaries, can and will are the most frequently used, even though the most frequent one may vary according to languages. The choice of modals is also found to be influenced by the prompt that is given to the writers. The paper serves as a foundation for further details studies on modal auxiliaries used by learners of English.