MODAL VERBS IN THE UN SECRETARY-GENERAL'S REMARKS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Remarks on Denominal Verbs

Word meaning confronts us, as acutely as anything in syntax, with what Chomsky has called Plato’s problem. We know far more about the meaning of almost any word than we could have learned just from our exposure to uses of it. Communication would be unbearably laborious if we did not share with other speakers the ability to generalize the meanings of words in the right ways. As Fodor (1981) note...

INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF CAUSATIVIZATION IN OVERPASSIVIZATION OF UN-ACCUSATIVE VERBS BY IRANIAN ENGLISH MAJORS

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating una...

Teaching Modal Verbs: Task-based vs. traditional approaches

Abstract Task-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. The present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. To this purpose, an Oxford Placement Test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. The selecte...

Remarks on our knowledge of modal facts

Learning English Auxiliary Modal Verbs by Iranian Children

Modal verbs in English are challenging to learn by speakers of other languages. The purpose of thiswas to shed light on the use of gesture in learning English modal verbs by Persian-speaking children.To achieve this, 60 elementary Iranian learners, studying at some institutes in Karaj took part in thisstudy. The participants were randomly put into one experimental group and one control group. T...