Homework

My reasearch subject is ’The frequency of modal verbs of politeness” applied in the

novel ’’Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen.
It is a specialised corpus, because it targets one text type which is an only one novel.
A specialised corpus is smaller in size compared to a general one. Also, I should apply the
internal criteria in my research to investigate the pragmatic features of the modal verbs of
politeness.
The purpose of my linguistic research is to create a representative corpus which could
be able to show how is the frequency of modal verbs of politeness used in that novel. I
could say that it is a representative source, so it is relevant. Also, I had consulted the
software called ’’MAXQDA” to search how many times the modal verbs of politeness
were used in various contexts. The results were: can-202 hits, may-186 hits, shall-158 hits,
will-407 hits, could-515 hits, might-200 hits, should-248 hits, would-468 hits. These are
the relative frequencies, so it is quantitative.
That being said, the corpus is balanced, relevant and reliable.