Реферат: Double modals as single lexical items in American English

e.g : He might not couldn’t be at home now .

He mighta should have gotten home by now .

Another rule involving morphology and DMs is tense concord , as discussed above . Other indications that tense treats DMs as units is that the verbal elements following the DM are almost never marked for tense , nor does have ever appear in quality of such following verbs. In other words , tense and have can iterate in this regional variety of English , but only within the DM , becoming this way quite complicate for a syntactic treatment of DMs .

3. SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC IRREGULARITIES

The third characteristic of multiword lexical items is that of semantic and syntactic irregularities . Multiword lexical constructions such as idioms and compound words have quite an unpredictable nature of their semantics , so the most available and traditional means in their study is the lexicon . For example , throw cold water and blackboard exhibit such semantic peculiarities ;

He is always throwing cold water on my ideas .

I prefer the green blackboards .

Until recently the word blackboard had only the compound type of semantics . This type of semantics has a trend to restrict the full range of this compound word’s meaning . That is , a blackboard was a black-coloured board used as a chalkboard , not just any black-coloured board . Now , however , since blackboard can also refer to a green chalkboard , the word begins to acquire the idiom-type , so-called noncompositional semantics.

Individual DMs have many similar traits with multiword lexical constructions in specific restrictions on their semantics . These restrictions , even if they show some systemacity , are usually referred to the lexicon .

Multiword lexical combinations typically exhibit syntactic irregulari- Ties as well . For example , idioms are usually not as syntactically flexible as their literal forms :

Her father laid the law down when she came home late .

He blew some steam off after he got home .

DMs also have some specific syntactic properties , some of which were already discussed . One point that hasn’t been made is that positive declarative DMs are more acceptable to a greater percentage of the population than negated or inverted DMs are .

CONCLUSION

In spite of being exclusively regional phenomenon , Double Modals are significant and commonly acknowledged realia of Modern American English . Like the other multiword modals (such as would rather ) they are taking their own function in human communication processes.

As to multiword modals’ attribution , they serve as necessary , basic expressions for all dialects of English . Thus , all dialects of English , both “double modal” and “single modal” ones , have such a set of expressions , and they do not differ qualitatively . The difference is quantitative one : Double Modal dialects have more of these multiword modals. There is also no doubt that Double Modals have many common properties with other multiword lexical constructions . Furthermore , being lexical items they contribute to simplify the syntax of the Auxiliary system of the English language .

In general , it could be wrong to consider Double Modals as any kind of gram-mar distortion . Their grammatical form is steady and scientifically recognized .As to their stylistical definition , they could be rather attributed to Regional Colloquialisms than to Slang . Also, while dealing with them special linguistic approach is necessary and the context should be taken into account .