Modal Verb use in the 19th Century Representation of Women

Persistent URL of this record https://hdl.handle.net/1887/135852

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Engelse taal en cultuur (BA)

Groot Wesseldijk, Doreth Ella Eugenie (2020)

Modal Verb use in the 19th Century Representation of Women

Bachelor thesis | Engelse taal en cultuur (BA)

I will start by touching on the existing scholarship centering around the language use of the authors in question, from a literary and linguistic point of view. Additionally, I will look at the previous studies on these authors’ perspective on women, as expressed in their work. Then I will discuss the methodology with which I researched the gendering of the modal verbs used by these authors. Next, using a corpus tool, I will review the resulting collocations, clusters, and concordance lists and analyse these findings in terms of the deontic modality associated with the female characters. Finally, I will try to establish if the male and female authors differ in the type and amount of modal verbs used to represent female characters.

19th & 20th century

Modal verb

D.H. Lawrence

Female representation

female representation through linguistic analysis

The Old Curiosity Shop

Women in Love