Roberta Facchinetti

Modality in contemporary English

This book offers original theoretical accounts and a wealth of descriptive information concerning modality in present-day English. At the same time, it provides fresh impetus to more general linguistic issues such as grammaticalization, colloquialization, or the interplay between sociolinguistic and syntactic constraints. The articles fall into four sections: (a) the semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs; (b) the status of emerging modal items; (c) stylistic variation and change; (d) sociolinguistic variation and syntactic models. The book is of considerable value to students and teachers of English and Linguistics at undergraduate and graduate level worldwide.

The rise of the To-infinitive

on those genres, the Gothic and romance in particular, to construct her fictional worlds. While Howells’ introduction claims Atwood’s alignment with high literature as well as popular culture, this essay as well as the rest of the articles largely ignore the role of popular genres in Atwood’s work. Moreover, while Dvorak initially raises the interesting point of Atwood’s humour as essentially Canadian and regional, she fails to work this issue out in the rest of her essay. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood is particularly strong in relating Atwood to her Canadian contexts, and in opening up new issues and methods in exploring her texts, such as globalization and even an ecocritical approach. However, the issue of high and low culture in her work could have received more attention; and while the introduction promises a focus on Atwood’s ‘‘international appeal as an imaginative writer’’ (p. 1), there is no profound discussion of the international reception of her writings. Since this is a topic largely unexplored in Atwood studies, future critical research may benefit from turning to this ‘‘unconquered’’ territory that may offer further insight in Atwood’s international acclaim.

Can and could in contemporary British English: a study of the ICEGB corpus

The aim of the present study is to chart the distribution and semantic/pragmatic values of can and could in Present-day British English. To do so, I have analysed the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), covering 1,000,000 words distributed across a variety of textual categories. The quantitative figures of the two modals have been drawn from the whole corpus, while a 10% random sample has been selected for semantic analysis. The data confirm that in contemporary British English can and could exhibit a spectrum of quantitative distributions and semantic values. This is particularly true of the overall higher frequency of can as opposed to could, and the discrepancy between the two modals recorded in their epistemic and dynamic uses. Special attention has been given to instances of ‘dynamic implication’, which are superficially similar to the occurrences of dynamic ability, but need a broader pragmatic framework to be interpreted correctly.