Problems of students’ reports focused on sentence-final modality forms: A corpus-based study of their actual use

Abstract

This study examines college students’ ability in academic writing, focusing on sentence-final modality forms (e.g., “to kangaerareru”). The targets of our analysis are modality forms that fall into the categories of inference, probability, and evidentiality, which appear at the end of a sentence. We constructed a corpus by collecting university students’ reports and academic papers and used them for the analysis.

The results indicated the following: 1) the verb form rareru is often used in academic papers, while there are reports on the frequent use of ru, ta, and teiru forms; 2) there is little variation of Chinese verbs in the reports and the specific use of “kosatsu sareru,” which does not appear in academic papers; and 3) many of the modalities were in overlapping forms in the reports, such as “nodehanaika+to kangaeru.” The results show that the use of sentence-final modality forms is more common in academic papers, and some overlapping modality forms may have become formulaic in reports.