Klages, Monika, & Römer, Ute (2002). Translating modal meanings in the EFL classroom. In Sybil Scholz, Monika Klages, Evelyn Hantson, & Ute Römer (Eds.), Language: Context and cognition. Papers in honour of Wolf-Dietrich Bald’s 60th birthday (pp. 201-216). München: Langenscheidt-Longman.
In this paper we will argue that the difficulties EFL learners encounter with respect to modal verbs in English are at least partially due to the learners’ limited access to the cultural values encoded in the descriptive labels used in the traditional paraphrases. On the basis of Anna Wierzbicka’s system of semantic primitives (e.g. 1972, 1992, 1996) we present alternative forms of paraphrases. We will start from the widely shared assumption that speech acts, i.e. (at least) their felicity and appropriateness conditions differ between cultures and that these differences correspond to different cultural norms which in turn are – to some extent – reflected in the language spoken. While Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) on the whole is sometimes criticized for its reductionism, its language-like conceptual system certainly provides a possible approximation to a culture-free metalanguage. We will provide examples which show that within limits it is possible to paraphrase modal notions by means of NSM.
Our discussion of the different meanings of the modals under investigation (can, may, will, shall, and must) will be based on real data, i.e. on actual occurrences of the modal verbs in the context of natural discourse. We see NSM paraphrases not only as useful points of departure for the teaching and learning of culture-based modal meanings and functions in the EFL classroom but also as a means to account for learner problems resulting from an overrepresentation of deontic modality in English textbooks. In the final section of this paper we will therefore suggest how taking into consideration the cultural concepts encoded in the use of modal auxiliaries may improve the teaching and learning success.
