On May 27, Dr. Hu Bo, Director of the Foreign Language Education and Research Center of the City University of Macau, gave a lecture in SFS entitled “Cross-Language Analysis of Modal Auxiliary Verbs”. The lecture was hosted by Qin Jianhua, and teachers and graduate students from the school attended.

Dr. Hu Bo first clarified some basic concepts. He observed that according to the existing definition, modal auxiliary verbs are classified into three categories: epistemic, deontic and dynamic. On the basis of extensive comparison of English, Chinese, Norwegian, Icelandic, Italian and other language-related sentence patterns, the different characteristics of the above three types of modal auxiliary verbs were summarized, which mainly include the spirit of the subject (+animated), the inanimate (-animated), whether the complement clause can be deleted or shifted, whether the pseudo-cleft sentence is allowed, and the size of the semantic domain. Based on the analysis, the existing theoretical hypothesis, raising and control hypothesis, was discussed and further revised.

Dr. Hu's research is in-depth and interesting, and inspired the teachers and students present. This is the 39th lecture of the Foreign Language Forum of the school.

(Report by Qin Jianhua  Pictures by Cen Haoxian)