The modal verb galėti ʻcan/could/may/mightʼ in academic Lithuanian: distribution, frequency and semantic properties

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the frequency and distribution patterns as well as the spectrum of modal meanings conveyed by the Lithuanian modal verb of possibility galėti 'can/could/may/might' in academic Lithuanian. The study is based on Corpus Academicum Lithuanicum (www.coralit.lt), a specialized synchronic corpus of written academic Lithuanian (roughly 9 million words). In order to allow a disciplinary comparison, the paper analyses the use of this modal verb in academic texts from three science fields: the humanities, the biomedical sciences and the technological sciences. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are employed alongside corpus-based analysis to reveal the ways in which this modal verb of possibility is used in academic language. The first part of the paper investigates the frequency patterns of various forms of galėti 'can/could/may/might' in the three science fields. The second part looks at the variety of meanings this modal verb can convey in Lithuanian specialised language. The results show that there is a fairly similar distribution of this modal verb across different science fields. In terms of its semantic functional capacities, galėti 'can/could/may/might' is used to convey all three types of modality (epistemic, deontic and dynamic), however, the most frequent use in Lithuanian academic discourse seems to be that of dynamic modality.

“At the end of this study, see the following discussion”: Endophoric markers in Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian research articles

“…To do so, we focus on three areally and historically close, but typologically and culturally diverse languages of Baltic countries: Estonian (Est), Latvian (Lat), and Lithuanian (Lit). Importantly, while the usage patterns of MD markers in Lit 2 are better understood (e.g., Šinkūnienė 2016, 2019, Ruskan, Maslauskienė 2023, the workings of MD in Est and Lat have not been closely examined. 3 Due to the space restrictions, we have chosen to concentrate on one specific category of interactive MD markers here, namely endophoric markers.…”