Investigating Modality in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities: A Corpus Driven Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Corpus analysis of any piece of writing gives an insight into the number and nature of the linguistic items used by the writer in that piece of writing. It helps us investigate the grammatical categories or linguistic items with their frequencies of occurrence in the writings of a specific writer. The present research presents a corpus-based study of Modals and modality in Kamila Shamsie’s novel “Burnt Shadows” and Charles Dicken’s novel, “A Tale of Two Cities”. The prime objective of this study is to investigate the significance of the modal auxiliaries used in these two novels, by giving their contrastive analysis. For this purpose, we have employed Antconc 3.5.8 software to count the frequencies and percentages of the Modal verbs used by both the novelists in these two novels. By using this model, we have been able to find out all the modal verbs that have been used in these two novels by applying plamer,s model. First of all, the frequencies of each modal verb existing in these novels were found out, then their comparative ratios or percentages were calculated for the sake of comparative linguistic analysis. The data results show that the modal verb “Will” has been used most frequently in Burnt shadows while it has 0 hits in “A Tale of Two Cities” in general spectrum. This study shows how two these two writers have exploited the modalities in different way in their novels to fulfill their purposes.