STATISTICAL, LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MODAL CONSTRUCTIONS WITH ‘CAN/COULD’ AND ‘MAY/MIGHT’

The article considers the possibility to introduce in the process of teaching the English conversational speech
the results of research in the field of corpus linguistics. The object of the study are modal constructions (MCs) with
‘can/could’ and ‘may/might’. The choice of the grammatical topic is connected with the difficulty to understand
the fundamental difference between the modal verbs ‘can/could’ and ‘may/might’ for the students of non-linguistic
universities learning English as a foreign language. The goal is to provide real data (statistical, lexical and
grammatical) that can help in solving the problem. The described research is based on the text corpora of the
sublanguages of scientific and technical communication “Heating Engineering”, “Electrical Engineering” and
“Automotive” compiled by a continuous sampling. The text corpora used are formed on the basis of scientific
articles in relevant fields of knowledge, published in journals in the UK and USA. The main topics of the texts that
were selected for research are included in the discussion of technical inventions, phenomena, and characteristics
of devices presented in the articles. The statistical characteristics of the modal constructions with ‘may/might’ and
‘can/could’ are different: the ‘can/could’ constructions surpass ‘may/might’ ones in both the number of units (20
and 13) and the total frequency of the use (1086 and 446, respectively). The correlation of values of ‘can/could’ and
‘may/might’ constructions show the surpass of ‘can/could’ over ‘may/might’ more than 1,5. This can be a statistical
mark for English learners. The ‘can/could’ constructions are grammatically more various. The analysis of the lexis
of the infinitives included in the both types of modal constructions has demonstrated that from this viewpoint there
are some differences between them (modal constructions). The infinitive constituent in ‘can/could’ constructions
possesses both commonly used and scientific lexical meanings. But in ‘may/might’ ones in most cases the infinitive
is referred predominantly to the commonly used lexical layer.