This paper reports the results of an eye-tracking during reading experiment carried out in order to investigate the online processing of the French modal verbs devoir ("must") and pouvoir ("can/may"). The nature – ambiguous/homonymic, polysemous or monosemic/under-specified – of the modals is tested through the manipulation in sentences of the root or epistemic meaning of the modal as well as t...

Early vocabularies in most languages tend to contain more nouns than verbs. Yet, the strength of this noun bias has been observed to vary across languages and cultures. Two main hypotheses have aimed at explaining such variations; either that the relative importance of nouns vs. verbs is languagespecific, or that socio-cultural influences shape early vocabulary structures. The present study com...

Vocabulary is one of the essential components of language and learning phrasal verbs as part of vocabulary is quite challenging for foreign language learners. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of visual and auditory input enhancement on learning non-congruent phrasal verbs. The participants of the study were 90 intermediate English language learners who were divided into two ...

The article deals with the study of linguo-stylistic means comic category representation at lexico-semantic level. Modern English prose is characterized by a specific modality, which characteristic feature author’s individual style. leading level, that contribute to realization effect in belles-letters texts, have been analyzed. material research English-language works small forms most prominen...

The present contribution deals with the epistemic readings of the Italian modal verbs dovere ('must') and potere ('may'/'can'). The two verbs show striking differences — both quantitative and qualitative — with respect to the possibility of epistemic interpretation, differences which have gone so far completely unnoticed in the — rather scarce — semantic literature on modal verbs in Italian. Ev...

This study, based on a corpus of Chinese EFL learners’ writing, has investigated their use modal verbs at levels 1 to 7 according the China’s Standards English Language Ability (CSE). The results quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that: 1) learners CSE 1-7 more in writing than native MICUSP; 2) they consistently overuse CAN, WILL SHOULD but underuse WOULD across levels; 3) salient f...