"can" and "may" in present-day English, Yvan Lebrun, 1965

In that post, I referred to a corpus-based study of "can" and "may" by Yvan Lebrun, namely "can" and "may" in present-day English (1965). In this post, I briefly present -- or rather log, the scope of Lebrun's study (I will present his general conclusions in a later post):

• the study is corpus-based and includes data from both British and American English
• a variety of genres are featured in the data: short stories, novels, plays, newspapers, scientific texts
• all texts featuring in the data were published between 1955 and 1962
• the study includes occurrences of might and could
• numbers of occurrences:

1. Total number of occurrences, including may, can, might, could: 4765
   
2. Total number of occurrences of can: 2024
   
3. Total number of occurrences of could: 1745
4. Total number of occurrences of may: 491
5. Total number of occurrences of might: 505

• Methodologically, Lebrun scanned each instance of the modals to ascertain lexical meanings. The modals were considered to convey the same lexical meaning whenever their semantical contents proved identical once such significant oppositions as "present"vs. "past" or "indicative" vs. "conditional" had been discarded (p.11)
• In order to decide on the semantical content of the modals, Lebrun relies on the context for each instance
• Lebrun first carries out a recognition process of all the lexical senses and then attempts to define them
  
• the process of defining the lexical senses was first motivated by Sommerfelt's recommendation (i.e. 'the definition be able to replace the word in an ordinary sentence'). Such 'replacement' process was abandoned on the basis that:
  

"In none of the lexical meanings CAN, COULD, MIGHT, MAY can be equated with a substitutable word or phrase. In fact, each of their lexical senses is so wide that only a long series of 'synonyms' can cover it" (p.11)

Further,

"Instead of defining CAN, COULD,MIGHT, MAY by means of longish strings of juxtaposed partial equivalents and thus blurring out the internal unity of the lemma's meaning, I renounced Sommerfelt's principle and aimed at definitions that (a) embrace every facets of the sense they are meant to cover, (b) bring out the internal unity of each meaning, and (c) emphasize what the various significations of a lemma have in common." (p.11)

• Overall methodological strategy :
  

1. Based on the three recognised lexical meanings and that are common to CAN, COULD, MIGHT, MAY, calculated how often each of these three meanings were expressed by MAY rather than by CAN and by MIGHT rather than by COULD.
2. Lebrun examines cases where MAY and CAN are synonyms
   
3. Based on the discovery that some collocations exclude the use of one of the two synonyms , Lebrun calculated the frequency of MAY relatively to CAN in kinds of clauses where either word can be used idiomatically and tried to find out if this relative frequency is independent of the context [my emphasis, this part of Lebrun's methodology reinforces the idea of including, in my study, two separate variables (i.e. SENSES and CONTEXT) for a treatment of the meanings of MAY and CAN, as featuring in my data. For more details on this, see this previous post).

Further reading (of early studies):

Lebrun, Y., Can and May, A Problem of Multiple Meaning, in Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguistics, 1962 (The Hague, Mouton, 1964)

Ten Bruggencate, K, The Use of Can and May, in Taalstudie 3 (1882), 94-106

Wood, F., May and Might in Modern English, Moderna Sprok 49 (1955), 247-253