LEXICAL, GRAMMATICAL AND STATISTICAL FEATURES OF CONSTITUENTS IN MODAL CONSTRUCTIONS WITH THE VERB ‘CAN’ (ON THE BASIS OF TEXT CORPORA OF SCIENTIFIC ENGINEERING DISCOURSE)

The article considers the problem the discourse study deals with – the functioning of text units. Modal constructions
with the verb ‘can’ have been chosen as an object of research. The goal of the article is to present lexical, grammatical and statistical features of the elements included in modal constructions with the modal verb ‘can’, which are met in text corpora
referred to scientific and engineering discourse. The following methods were applied: contextual method; the method of survey of experts who possess background knowledge in these areas of science and technology; statistical method of rank correlation; quantitative analysis. The material for the experiment is the text corpora of the technical fields “Power Engi- neering”, “Electrical Engineering” and “Automotive”, the text corpora size is 300 thousand tokens. The usage of the texts that are different as to their research topics in fundamental branches of science and technology will help to make general conclusions, forming style-identifying marks of scientific an engineering discourse. In the analyzed text corpora “Power Engineering”, “Electrical Engineering” and “Automotive” 28 models with a total frequency of 1100 speech units were dis-
covered. The study shows that the highest priority is possessed by the modal verb constructions which have the forms of the passive infinitive, the highest total absolute frequency is possessed by ‘can be Ven’ (F*= 481) construction. Modal constructions with the infinitive in the active voice appear on the second place as to their frequency of usage. Besides the modal constructions functioning with aspectual-temporal forms of the infinitive there four versions of the model “can be + name”, but the amount of such kind of models is so small that these cases could be negligible. The classification of the infinitives entering the modal constructions according to their lexical meanings demonstrates that the majority of the
infinitive constituents can be referred to common and general scientific lexical layers, and only a small percentage – to terminological one. As to the modal verb ‘can’ itself, it constantly remains its modal meaning “physical ability to do something” in practically all the modal constructions. And only in the models “can be + name” a new semantic version “probability” appears