BE ABLE TO in Present-day English

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  • 現代英語におけるBE ABLE TO について
  • ゲンダイ エイゴ ニ オケル BE ABLE TO ニ ツイテ

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This study seeks to analyze the form and meaning of a quasi-modal auxiliary BE ABLE TO in Present-day English.　The data was chiefly provided by the approximately 1,000,000 word Brown Corpus.　In order to make clear the characterisitics of BE ABLE TO, the study compares the uses of BE ABLE TO and those of CAN. It is generally believed that BE ABLE TO is used as a supplemental form of CAN.　That is to say, BE ABLE TO supplies the forms which CAN cannot provide, or it is used to satisfy requirements of rhythm and sentence balance, for the sake of euphony, and for other stylistic reasons (see Visser 1963-1973: §1738, 1746).　BE ABLE TO is more flexible in the syntactic forms that CAN, particularly in its ability to co-occur with true modals, to occur in non-finite forms and with more complex tense and aspect markings that simple present and past (see Coates 1983:125).　And moreover, when the meaning is taken into consideration, several interesting uses that seem unique to BE ABLE TO emerge.　A summary list of these uses follows, which turns out to reinforce the research of Coates(1983). (i) BE ABLE TO seems to cover the whole range of meaning associated with CAN, that is to say, BE ABLE TO is not only synonymous with CAN in the ability sense, but also it shares the senses of permission and possibility with CAN. (ii) BE ABLE TO focuses on the event in the past and emphasizes the achievement of that event, while COULD does not function as the past form of CAN in the sense of a single event. (iii) In order to express the future ability, the form of WILL BE ABLE TO is used, while CAN refers to the future permission, not the future ability. (iv) BE ABLE TO is more often used in the formal or written form.

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