Bělíková Zuzana The Modal Verb Could and its Equivalents in Translation

4.1
 
Hypothesis 
It is mentioned above that modality is more frequent in English than in Czech. The aim is 
to prove or disprove this argument. It is expected that there are several examples where 
modality in original writings is somehow omitted or replaced by different expressions. It is 
also possible that there are only certain combinations or types of verbs that carry modality 
in English but they are usually substituted by different clues or they are simply absent
in Czech versions. Such verbs can be verbs of perception or state cognitive verbs.
The research may show whether various pronouns (in a function of a subject)
in combination with could can change modality that could carries in English interrogative 
sentences. Some differences may be found in negative sentences, too. 

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Philosophical Faculty, Palacký University Olomouc 
33 
5
 
METHODOLOGY 
There are three kinds of analyses that I will use in my research. These methods are closely 
connected with one another. The first one is the comparative study that is already 
introduced above. The rule is to compare at least two phenomena and these are the English 
and the Czech languages in my survey. The second method is a lexicological study because 
I focus on one particular word which is the modal verb could. This study can be used 
thanks to corpora that are created for linguistic research. These corpora also provide
the data that can be used for my last method which is the quantitative analysis. Numbers
of the occurrence of could in my subcorpus can be counted and evaluated and results can 
be recorded into statistics. 
I will use the corpus based research for my analysis. All information will be stated bellow.