This paper investigates Arab EFL learners’ acquisition of modal verbs. The study used a questionnaire, which comprises two versions, testing students’ mastery of modals at the levels of both recognition and production. The questionnaire was distributed to 50 English major university students who had studied English for 12-14 years and who had scored 500 or more on the TOEFL. The findings of the study show that the overall performance of the subjects in the study was quite low. The study established a hierarchy of difficulty and identified the major causes of difficulty in the use of modals.
The present study focuses on the origin of the idiom shall’s ‘shall we’ in two corpora: the online database The Collected Works of Shakespeare and a corpus of Ben Jonson works compiled on the basis of online html texts linked to the webpage Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature. The Works of Ben Jonson. The paper discusses available accounts of the issue offered by late nineteenth and early twentieth century linguists and juxtaposes them with new findings and observations. The author analyzes data concerning shall’s, shall us, shall we, let’s and let us to suggest a new hypothesis on the potential rise of shall’s, i.e. that the idiom resulted from a blending of shall we and let’s.
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