A Corpus-Based Study of Modality in the English and Chinese Versions

This paper compares the use of modal expressions in the English and Chinese versions of Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ (2015). It explores the Encyclical Letter as a corpus through the study of word lists and parallel concordance lines. The research also benefits from the close parallel reading of extracts from the two versions. It focuses on the semantic areas of prediction/volition/intention, lack of possibility/ ability/permission and obligation. The results confirm predictable parallel expressions (e.g. will and 会 huì, cannot and 不能 bùnéng, be called to and 召 zhào) and bring to light less predictable renderings – e.g. zero (in English) and 会 huì, cannot and 无法 wúfǎ, the noun vocation and 召 zhào. They also suggest that some translation choices are due to the translator’s attempt to make the text explicit and to adapt it to the target culture.


1
Introduction 1 This paper explores Laudato Si', Pope's Francis' second Encyclical Letter, issued in 2015. Novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh (2016) compares it to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which was also released in 2015 by diplomats and delegates from the United Nations. He claims that both texts "occupy a realm that few texts can aspire to: one in which words effect changes in the real world" (Ghosh 2016, 150). They are both founded on the results of research produced by climate science, yet they diverge sharply in linguistic terms. The Encyclical is "remarkable for the lucidity of its language and the simplicity of its construction", while the Paris Agreement is "highly stylised in its wording and complex in structure" (Ghosh 2016, 151). Ghosh goes on to say that "mass organisations will have to be in the forefront of the struggle. And of such organisations, those with religious affiliations possess the ability to mobilise people in far greater numbers than any others" (Gosh 2016, 160). The Papal document thus appears to be particularly meaningful and worth investigating from a linguistic perspective: it lucidly discusses climate change issues and has the potential to effectively put forward insightful religious, cultural, social and economic lines of action against it. The recent branch of linguistics called "ecolinguistics" attempts to raise awareness on "discourses that have (or potentially have) a significant impact not only on how people treat other people, but also on how they treat the larger ecological systems that life depends on" (Stibbe 2014, 118). In line with this approach, Castello and Gesuato (2019) explore the language of the English version of Laudato Si' using corpus-based methods. Among their findings is the frequent use of modality in the text, with the modal verbs must, cannot, need, needs, should, can figuring among the keywords they obtained. They also identified a number of other expressions of modality, including fail to and be called to. They claim that the modal items identified and their patterns of occurrence suggest that Laudato Si' is mainly oriented towards the expression of deontic (participant external) modality, qualifying the degree of human involvement in and responsibility for the well-being of the planet. Additionally, […] the text draws attention to the possibility for humankind to perceive and become aware of the planet's present condition and future prospects. (Castello, Gesuato 2019, 139-40) § 2 provides a brief introduction to Laudato Si', while § 3 presents the concept of modality and its realisation in English and Chinese. § 4 introduces corpus-based translation studies of English and Chinese, and § 5 describes the features of the two texts and how they are investigated as corpus data. Finally, § 6 discusses the results, starting from general observations and then focusing on three areas of modality and a selection of modal items.  (Tilche, Nociti 2015, 5) writing in different languages, which is the case for most papal texts. Encyclicals are normally released in one modern language, mainly French, German or Italian, while their Latin version, the authoritative one, is usually produced at a later stage (Teubert 2007, 95). Laudato Si' is currently available in fourteen languages, including Italian, Latin, English, and Chinese. 3 The Chinese translation is released both in simplified characters, Chinese (China), and in traditional characters, Chinese (Taiwan). Laudato Si' consists of a Preamble, six chapters and two final prayers, "A Prayer for Our Earth" and "A Christian Prayer in Union with Creation". Chapters one, three, four and five appear to have a stronger economic and ecological slant, while chapters two and six share a more religious and pastoral thrust (Castello, Gesuato 2019, 134). The Preamble provides an overview of the Pope's thought, of Saint Francis' view of beauty and fraternity, and of the ethical and spiritual roots of environmental problems. It calls for a spiritual change of humankind and expresses the Pope's openness to a dialogue with science (Tilche, Nociti 2015, 2). The first chapter draws a picture of the problems our common home (Chinese: 我们的共同家园 wǒmen de gòngtóng jiāyuán) 4 is now facing, including the changes affecting humanity and our planet, the throwaway culture (Chinese: 丢 弃文化 diūqì wénhuà), and climate as a common good (气候乃是大众福 祉 qìhòu nǎi shì dàzhòng fúzhǐ). Subsequently, it describes some features of climate change using "correct but non-scientific language" (Tilche, Nociti 2015, 3), such as the pressure on water resources and the loss of biodiversity, and finally it addresses the human and social dimension of the ecological crisis. The second chapter re-reads biblical texts concerning the relationship between God, humankind and nature. It focuses on the mystery of the universe and on the conception of creation as a gift from God. It ends up claiming that creation is bound up with the mystery of Christ. The third chapter explores the ultimate causes of the ecological crisis with reference to philosophy and science and to the global phenomena known as technocratic paradigm and power. It then looks at the consequences of modern anthropocentrism, that is practical relativism, at the need to protect employment, and finally considers new biological technologies. The fourth chapter gets to the core of Pope Francis's message and proposes integral ecology (整体生态学 zhěngtǐ shēngtàixué) as the fruitful combination of scientific, environmental, economic and social perspectives on ecology. The Pope also puts forward the concepts of cultural ecology (文化生态学 wénhuà shēngtàixué) and the ecology of daily life (日常生活的生态学 rìcháng shēnghuó de shēngtàixué), in view of the principle of the common good (公益原则 gōngyì yuánzé) and of the need of justice between the generations (Spadaro 2015). The fifth chapter claims that a series of patterns of dialogue should be pursued with a view to escaping the current spiral of self-destruction: dialogue in the international community, dialogue for new national and local policies, dialogue and transparency in decision-making, dialogue between politics and economy for human fulfilment, dialogue between religions and science. The sixth chapter posits that an ecological conversion (生态皈依 shēngtài guīyī) is needed. People should change their lifestyle and overcome selfishness. They should be educated for the covenant between humanity and the environment, which should bring them joy and peace, reflected in a balanced lifestyle and a deeper understanding of life. The Eucharist and the day of rest should motivate people's concerns for the environment.

Modality in English and Chinese
Modality is a semantic category which is "centrally concerned with the speaker's attitude towards the factuality or actualisation of the situation expressed by the rest of the clause" (Huddleston 2002, 172-3). By contrast, mood is a formally grammaticalized category of the verb which has a modal function. [Mood is] expressed inflectionally, generally in distinct sets of verbal paradigms, e.g. indicative, subjunctive, optative, im-perative, conditional etc., which vary from one language to another. (Bybee, Fleischmann 1995, 2) English modality has been studied extensively from various perspectives, including the semantic (e.g. Lyons 1977;Bybee, Fleischman 1995;Palmer 2001;Portner 2009), the descriptive (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985;Huddleston 2002) and the functional one (e.g. Halliday 1976Halliday , 2004. This phenomenon has also been addressed in the field of Chinese linguistics, and various proposals have been put forward to categorise Chinese modality (e.g. Tsang 1981;Peng 2007;Tang 2000;Chappell, Peyraube 2016). Scholars have also explored Chinese modality in relation to English modality from the contrastive and typological perspective (e.g. Li 2004;Hsieh 2005) and the functional perspective (e.g. Chen 2017). A large number of studies have also availed themselves of corpus-based methods (Coates 1983;Biber et al. 1999;Carter, McCarthy 2006) for the study of modality. From the semantic perspective, von Wright (1951) breaks down modality into "epistemic", "deontic", and "dynamic" modality. Epistemic modality is concerned with "the speaker's attitude to the truthvalue or factual status of the proposition", deontic modality "relates to obligation or permission emanating from an external source", while dynamic modality "relates to the ability or willingness which comes from the individual concerned" (Palmer 2001, 9-10). This terminology has been frequently elaborated and revised. For example, Chappell and Peyraube (2016, 299-300) follow van der Auwera and Plungian's (1998) framework and distinguish between epistemic and "situational" (non-epistemic) modality. More specifically, they divide situational modality into "participant-internal" and "participant-external". Furthermore, they associate epistemic modality with the semantic fields of possibility, probability, certainty. and necessity, participant-external modality with possibility, permission, obligation, requirement, and necessity, and, finally, participant-internal modality with ability, willingness, volition, and intention. The subdivision between participant-internal and participant-external modality partly overlaps with that between dynamic and deontic modality (e.g. Palmer 2001), yet in Chappell and Peyraube's (2016) framework the main discriminating factor lies in whether the modal meaning is related to the subject of the sentences or to an external participant. Chappell and Peyraube's (2016) semantic categorisation is reproduced in table 1: In English, modality is primarily expressed by core modal auxiliaries (e.g. must, will, should) and marginal auxiliaries or quasi-modals (e.g. have to, need to, be bound to) (Quirk et al. 1985, 237). English modal auxiliaries display special features, including the fact that they have no -s form for the third person singular (e.g. *cans, *musts), take negation directly (e.g. can't/cannot, mustn't), do not admit cooccurrence (e.g. *may will), and take inversion without do (e.g. can I?, must I) (Coates 1983, 4). Quasi-modals do not share these features with modal auxiliaries and are much closer to lexical verbs. Modality is also conveyed by "lexical modals", a broad category comprising items that do not belong to the class of auxiliary verbs. It includes adjectives (e.g. possible, necessary), adverbs (e.g. perhaps, possibly), lexical verbs (e.g. hope, want), and nouns (e.g. possibility, necessity) (Huddleston 2002, 173). Chinese expresses modality by means of grammatical, lexical and syntactic devices. It shares with English the use of modal auxiliary verbs (variously named, e.g. 情态助动词 qíngtài zhùdòngcí or 能愿动 词 néngyuàn dòngcí) and lexical modals, such as modal adverbs (态 度副词 tàidù fùcí). It also employs the so-called modal particles (语 气助词 yǔqì zhùcí) and the potential construction, also known as potential verb compound (Hsieh 2005, 38;Chappell, Peyraube 2016, 297, 312-14).
Adverbs such as 竟 jìng, 居然 jūrán, 究竟 jiūjìng, 或许 huòxǔ, and 显 然 xiǎnrán belong to the category of modal adverbs (e.g. Chao 1968, 780-90;Li, Thompson 1983, 267-8). Modal or sentence particles (e.g. 吗 ma, 呢 ne, 啊 a, 吧 ba, 了 le and 嘛 ma) are morphemes uttered in the neutral tone occurring at the end of an utterance with the aim of adding modal and attitudinal meanings to it (Chao 1968, 796;Abbiati 2014, 58). Finally, potential constructions (verb compounds) derive from both resultative and directional verb compounds and can indicate either ability or possibility, as can be seen from example (1): 7 1. 听得懂 tīng de dǒng hear pot understand 'can understand' Li and Thompson (1981, 182-3) suggest a series of functional correspondences between Chinese and English modal auxiliaries. Sparvoli (2012, 209) elaborates on their proposal, and puts forward a possible mapping of modal Chinese/English pairs of auxiliaries onto van der Auwera and Plungian's (1998) semantic categories. Table 2 is an adaptation of Sparvoli's list of correspondences, and will be the starting point for the study presented in this paper. Differently from Sparvoli (2012), the categories "participant-internal volition, intention", "epistemic possibility" and "epistemic necessity, certainty" have been included. Also, a wider repertoire of Chinese and English modal auxiliaries is presented, as they are relevant to this study. 8 From table 2, the polysemous nature of some auxiliary verbs is apparent, as they straddle one or more semantic categories. This is the case of will and 会 huì, can and 能 néng, 可以 kěyǐ and 要 yào. The English modal auxiliary will can alternatively indicate epistemic possibility/probability or participant-internal willingness and intention (Coates 1983, 170-1;Huddleston 2002, 188-91). Shall can be used with first person subjects either singular or plural, as an alternative of will to ask for the intention or volition of the addressee. Also, in more formal and prescriptive contexts, will and shall can convey obligation (participant-internal modality) (Coates 1983, 185-6). In this last sense, will/shall correspond to the Chinese auxiliary 要 yào and to other verbs indicating participant-internal volition/intention.
The Chinese modal 会 huì can take on three main meanings: 1) 'know how to, have the ability to'; 2) 'be good at'; 3) 'there is the possibility (that...)' (our translation) (Lǚ 2004, 278-9). In the first two senses it overlaps semantically with the English auxiliary core modal can and the quasi-modal be able to, and indicates participant-internal ability, while in the third sense it covers part of the semantic area of will and shall.
The modal auxiliary can has the potential to express epistemic possibility, participant-internal ability or participant-external possibility and permission, and thus it overlaps semantically with the Chinese auxiliaries 能 néng and 可以 kěyǐ. Interpreting whether the use of can is epistemic, participant-internal or participant-external can be hard in some contexts, as suggested, for example, by Biber et al. (1999, 491-3) with regard to academic prose.
Finally, as seen above, not only can 要 yào be employed to convey participant-internal volition or intention, but also participant-external necessity, obligation, and requirement, and thus corresponds to, for instance, English must, should, and need to.
As noticed by Coates (1983, 20), the negative forms of some English modal auxiliaries are unavailable in the language, and alternative ones have to be used to make up for them. For example, in British English the negative form of epistemic must is cannot and not *mustn't. This phenomenon, also known as 'suppletion', can be found in Chinese as well, in that some modal auxiliaries have a negative counterpart which differs from the positive one for all or some of their meanings (Sparvoli 2012, 171). For example, 可以 kěyǐ takes on the negative forms 不能 bù néng, 不行 bù xíng, 不成 bù chéng or 不值 得 bù zhídé when it indicates negative participant-external possibility. The auxiliaries 要 yào, 必须 bìxū and 得 děi are negated by 不用 búyòng or 不必 búbì in contexts in which they express participantexternal necessity. Furthermore, the verb 要 yào, indicating participant-internal volition and intention, is negated with 不想 bù xiǎng, 不会 bú huì, or 不可能 bù kěnéng (Abbiati 2014, 213-20).
In spite of these shared functional and semantic aspects, many authors have pointed out typological differences between modality in English and Chinese, especially from the morphosyntactic perspective (e.g. Li, Thompson 1981;Tang 2000;Li 2004). In this respect, Li claims that: modal verbs in English and Chinese are very different things [...] They constitute a grammatical category belonging to "auxiliary verbs". However, apart from the component of the modals, the auxiliary verbs of the two languages share little resemblance. The "helping" functions of English auxiliaries in aspect, phase, and voice do not exist with Chinese auxiliaries. "Auxiliary verb" is a suitable term for the intermediate category between verbs and modal verbs in English, but not for that in Chinese. Chinese has no auxiliary verbs in the English sense. (2004,316) 4 Corpus Linguistics for the Study of English and Translated Chinese Language corpora are naturally occurring language data, stored as computer files. An important distinction can be drawn between general corpora, representing a language as a whole, and specialised corpora, focusing on a specific language variety. Depending on the type of language under examination and the research questions the corpus is designed to address, one might need to restrict the number of texts that make up a corpus (Baker 2010, 12-14). Pierini (2015), for example, carries out a study of the translation of English compound adjectives from English into Italian and chooses to study only one text, Stephen King's novel Under the Dome and its Italian translation. She claims that while it is true that "a small corpus provides a partial insight into a phenomenon" it "can be scanned manually so that the collection of data does not leave out any […] pattern" (Pierini 2015, 22). Corpus linguistics can be defined as a series of methods, techniques, and processes for the investigation of language corpora, including the analysis of word frequencies, concordances, collocations, keywords and the dispersion of words and keywords (Baker 2010, 5, 19-30).
Some studies have applied corpus-based methods to the investigation of translated language. These are known as Corpus-Based Translation Studies and are based on bilingual parallel corpora and comparable corpora of native and translated texts. This research attempts "to uncover evidence to support or reject the so-called translation universal hypotheses" (Xiao, Wei 2014, 3), including the existence of translation phenomena such as explicitation and simplification (e.g. Laviosa 2002). Explicitation, in particular, is "an overall tendency to spell things out rather than leave them implicit in translation" (Baker 1996, 180). Xiao (2010) examines features of translated Chinese emerging from the study of a corpus of translated texts compared to original Chinese texts. His analysis reveals the presence of "properties which are specific to English-to-Chinese translation due to translation shifts", including significantly lower lexical density and a lower proportion of lexical words over function words than in native Chinese (Xiao 2010, 29). Xiao and Dai reevaluate the "English-based" translation universal hypotheses and suggest that: some [hypotheses] (e.g. explicitation) are supported in Chinese while others are not fully supported (e.g. simplification) […]. More specifically, translational language is more explicit semantically, lexically, grammatically and logically. But simplification is not a pure, simple phenomenon in that translated texts may be simpler in some aspects but more complicated in others vis-à-vis comparable native texts. (2014,50) Xiao and Wei call for further corpus-based translation and cross-linguistic studies of "genetically distant languages such as English and Chinese" (2014, 5), as they can have important implications for linguistic theorisation.
Corpus-based translation studies can also have practical aims and implications. Lian and Jiang (2014), for example, examine the use of modality in a parallel corpus of Chinese laws and regulations of international exchanges and their translations into English. Such legal texts have become increasingly important in our globalised world, and more attention should be paid to their translation, as translators tend to use the "modal operator" shall excessively and to misuse other English modal operators. Furthermore, they tend to overuse synonymous words to avoid repetitions, but in this way they violate the principles of consistency, accuracy, and authority of the law (Lian, Jiang 2014, 502).
Finally, corpus linguistics methodologies have also informed the study of the writings of the Catholic Church. Teubert (2007), for instance, examines concordances extracted from a corpus of encyclical letters and other texts about the social doctrine of the Church and explores the evolution of the meaning of concepts such as 'natural law', 'human rights', and 'property' over time. The author claims that not only can corpus linguistics help to identify the regularities of language use, but also to observe the construction of social reality in a given discourse at a given time (Teubert 2007, 89).

5
The Data and the Analysis The English and the Chinese versions of the Encyclical Letter were downloaded from the Vatican website as PDF files and converted into .txt files. We tokenised the Chinese text with the aid of the software SegmentAnt (Anthony 2018), as Chinese is written as running strings of characters without spaces delimiting words (Xiao 2010, 14). We checked the output of the software manually and made some changes to it. For example, Some sets of characters had been treated by the software as single units, while for semantic and syntactic reasons we decided to separate them and put a space between them, e.g. 一 些 yī xiē, 就是 jiù shì, 不可 bù kě, 不能 bù néng.The first string is composed of a numeral followed by a classifier and the remaining ones of an adverb followed by a verb. By contrast, we decided to write idiomatic expressions with no space between their characters, e.g. 若无 其事 ruòwúqíshì 'as if it did/does not concern him'. In dubious cases, we consulted the 现代汉语词典 Xiandai Hanyu Cidian -The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (2014). Once the two versions were ready for analysis, we processed them by means of the software AntConc (Anthony 2019), and obtained word lists and concordances for a selection of both English and Chinese modal expressions. The word lists provided information about the frequency of all the words in each corpus, while concordances presented all the occurrences of a given modal item within their linguistic contexts. We first identified parallel expressions that encode modal meanings in the two languages (cf. Tognini-Bonelli 1996, 198). Subsequently, we attempted to "locate meaningful correspondences and build up a network of semantic relations across the two languages"; however, as is often the case, some "mismatches [came] to light […]: these are just as important as the similarities between the two languages" (Tognini-Bonelli 1996, 199). Using an Excel spreadsheet, we matched each line in a concordance with the corresponding "co-text" in the other version of the Letter and inserted the parallel expressions into to two adjacent columns for further analysis. This procedure provided us with a framework for the study of translation equivalence in the English and in the Chinese version with regard to modality.
As can be seen from table 3, the number of word types (i.e. unique words) and word tokens (i.e. running words) in the two versions is similar, and so is the type/token ratio, that is the ratio between the number of types and the number of tokens (Xiao 2010, 17). The two research questions explored in this study are: 1. Which are the most important 'meaningful correspondences' of a selection of the most frequent English modal expressions in the two versions, and how can they help understand the semantic space covered by each expression in Laudato Si'? 2. Can any differences in the use of modal items be detected which might not only be due to typological contrasts between the two languages but also, or exclusively, to attempts to make the target text more explicit?

An Analysis of Modality in Laudato Si'
This section first looks at the overall use of modality in the English and Chinese versions of Laudato Si' ( § 6.1). It then zooms in on the use of a selection of frequently occurring modal expressions indicating epistemic possibility and probability and participant-internal willingness, intention ( § 6.2), lack of participant-internal ability or participant-external possibility ( § 6.3), and participant-external obligation and requirement ( § 6.4). Table 4 lists the most frequent modal expressions found on the English and Chinese word lists, respectively. On the one hand, the modal expressions occurring at least 30 times in the English version are can, will, would, must, cannot, should and may, the lemmas NEED (verb) and CALL (verb). 9 On the other hand, the ones that stand out quantitatively in the Chinese version are the modal verbs 能 néng, 会 huì, 可 kě, 要 yào, 应 yīng, 必须 bìxū, and 可以 kěyǐ, the modal verb/noun 需要 xūyào, the adverb 将 jiāng and the compound verb 无法 wúfǎ. We 9 Capital letters indicate lemmas, that is, groups of all inflectional forms related to one stem that belong to the same word class (Kučera, Francis 1967, 19 decided to also include the occurrences of NEED (noun), which are very frequent in the Letter, and also those of HOPE (noun) and CALL (noun), 10 because their equivalent Chinese translations 需要 xūyào, 希望 xīwàng, 召 zhào and its compound forms (indicated as 召* zhào*) are used as both verbs and nouns. The raw frequencies are provided along with the normalised frequencies per number of word tokens. For space constraints, we decided to focus on the following selection of English modal expressions: will/shall (not), cannot and may/might not and CALL (verb and noun, expressing a modal meaning). The auxiliaries will/shall and cannot (may not) were chosen because of their polysemous nature, that is, because of their potential to cover more than one of the meanings identified in table 2 above. The quasi-modal CALL, on the other hand, was chosen because previous research had identified it as a marker of modality in Laudato Si'. Starting from these English modals, we first investigated how their instances are rendered into Chinese, and came up with lists of Chinese equivalents for each one of them. As predictable, in almost all cases each identified Chinese modal translates various source expressions and not just the ones from which we started. Therefore, we also created and analysed lists of source items corresponding to the most frequent Chinese equivalents. § § 6.3 to 6.5 illustrate in detail the results of this 'bi-directional' analysis, which aims at shedding light on the semantic space covered by each of these English modal verbs with respect to their Chinese translation equivalents and at exploring possible instances of explicitation.

Modality in the English and Chinese Versions. General Observations
As can be noticed from table 4, the number of modal verbs identified in the Chinese version of Laudato Si' is higher than those in the English one. This may be due to two main reasons. The first one is that some modal expressions used in the Chinese version do not correspond to any explicit modal expression in English, as illustrated by example (2) The second one is that in our corpus a large number of English adjectives (e.g. possible, probable, able) used in impersonal constructions, such as the one in example (3) It stands to reason that a complete correspondence between the English and the Chinese modal expressions in the two versions cannot be expected, as a given modal meaning in one language can be phrased in the other language in various ways, according to the specific contextual (and typological needs) and the translator's preferences. Furthermore, the original English (co-)texts often differ from the translated ones in various other respects, including syntactic aspects. For example, in the parallel sentences in excerpt (4)

Will/Shall. Epistemic Possibility and Probability; Participant-Internal Willingness and Intention
Table 5 lays out the translations of the instances of will and shall in the Letter. As can be noticed, 37 occurrences of will are not translated into Chinese altogether, 26 are translated with the verb 会 huì, 9 with the adverb 将 jiāng, 4 with 能 néng, 3 with the adverb/verb combination 将会 jiāng huì or its negative counterpart 将 (不) 会 jiāng (bu) huì. Finally, 无法 wúfǎ translates negative uses of will in four cases. As for shall (not), all the instances but one are part of citations from the Bible or from other documents. Only one case of shall conveys epistemic modality and is translated as 会 huì, while the others express participant-external modality. We will deal with some instances of them in § 6.3 below. 会 huì is the second most used modal verb in the Chinese version after 能 néng [tab. 2]. As seen in § 3, 会 huì can indicate epistemic possibility and probability as well as participant-internal ability, while 能 néng expresses both participant-internal ability and external possibility (Abbiati 2014, 213).
An interesting modal item is the adverb 将 jiāng, 11 which is used in formal written Chinese to indicate imminent future reference or certainty about a future situation (Lǚ 2004, 300). Generally speaking, future tense and modality are strongly linked. With regard to will and shall, for instance, Coates points out that "it would be meaningless to be willing or to intend to do something which has already been done" (1983,. Furthermore, Lehmann notices that from a diachronic perspective "often the future may arise through the grammaticalisation of a desiderative modal", of which "will is a known example" (2002,26). That is, although modal expressions signal epistemic possibility and probability or participant-internal ability rather than future time per se, they are used with reference to future events or states. 12 The translation of will/shall (not) with 会 huì and 将 jiāng was expected, while the correspondence with 无法 wúfǎ was not, both because of its meaning (see the description in § 6.3) and because, like 将 jiāng, it is not often mentioned in studies on modality. The frequent use of 会 huì and 将 jiāng suggests that epistemic possibility and probability and participant-internal willingness and intention are the main semantic areas covered by will in the Encyclical Letter. Examples (5) and (6) show the use of 会 huì as a translation of will, while example (7) illustrates how 将 jiāng is used to this end: 11 Some authors, including Smith and Erbaugh (2005, 731), consider 将 jiāng as a modal verb.
12 For a more in-depth treatment of modality in relation to tense, see Portner (5) is an extract from the "Preamble" and expresses the Pope's intention to address a given topic later on in the Letter, while example (6) predicts that a given event will happen in the future. 将 jiāng in example (7) also conveys the meaning of epistemic possibility and probability rather than imminent future reference or certainty about a future situation, which suggests that the semantic spaces covered by 将 jiāng and 会 huì are very close. However, the two of them are also used together in the combination 将会 jiāng huì to translate some other instances of will, which suggests that their meanings do not fully overlap and that, if used together, they complement each other, such as in extract (8) A large number of instances of will (37) are not translated into Chinese with an explicit modal expression. The reason for this choice is not easy to explain, yet three observations can be made. Firstly, on some occasions the original English text had to be rephrased to meet the needs of Chinese syntax and discourse, which also involved omitting the translation of the modality. This is especially the case of many English restrictive relative clauses which were translated into Chinese as pre-modifying structures, as example (9)  As can be noticed, the relative construction pre-modifying the noun 人 rén 'person' does not explicitly render will. This can be related to a general tendency in Chinese to avoid the use of grammatical markers in such constructions, including the perfective aspectual marker 了 le and modal particles. Secondly, some other instances of will are not explicitly translated when the verb hope (Chinese 希望 xīwàng and 盼望 pànwàng) is used in the main clause to introduce another clause expressing futurity with will, such as in example (10) Hope implies the speaker's attitude towards the future (cf. Portner 2009, 6), which is arguably the reason why the translator did not feel the need to translate will explicitly. Thirdly, when a quasi-modal (e.g. be able to) is used in combination with will, only the meaning of the quasi-modal is translated. 14 Example (11) illustrates that 能 néng translates the meaning of be able to but not that of will: 11. Only by cultivating sound virtues will people be able to make a selfless ecological commitment. Four cases of will were rendered with the verb 能 néng expressing participant-internal ability or epistemic possibility (see example (12)), while four cases of will plus a negative element were translated with 无法 wúfǎ, functioning as a marker of negative participant-internal ability (see example (13)). Obviously, as is always the case, it is the overall meaning emerging from the unfolding discourse rather than that of a single word (e.g. the modal verb will) that leads a translator to make a given translation choice.  Chao (1968, 732), two or more auxiliary verbs, including 会能 huì and 能 néng, can occur in succession. The translator clearly did not opt for this use in this case.

Sinica venetiana 6 201
Corpus-Based Research on Chinese Language and Linguistics, 181-218 ture even more explicit. For example, in excerpt (14) the adverb 永远 yǒngyuǎn, which, unlike the English adverb never, can only refer to the future, occurs before 无法 wúfǎ: 14.
[…] so too living species are part of a network which we will never fully explore and understand.
[ The compound 无法 wúfǎ will be dealt with in more detail in § 6.3 below as a translation equivalent of cannot. The other translations of will are not discussed here, as they occur only once each. They include the modal auxiliaries 应 yīng, 不可能 bù kěnéng, 可 kě, 可能 kěnéng, 必要 bìyào, 要 yào, 足以 zúyǐ and the adverbs 未必 wèibì and 决 jué.
The right-hand side of table 6 below summarises the English modal expressions that were translated into Chinese with 会 huì, 将 jiāng and 将会 jiāng huì and their frequencies. The analysis of these translation equivalents aims to illuminate the semantic space covered by these three Chinese modal expressions further, with reference to the original modal expressions and their co-texts.

Sub-total 9
Grand total 170 The data shows that 58 cases of 会 huì, 14 of 将 jiāng, and 3 of 将 会 jiāng huì do not correspond to any explicit modal element in the original version, while 26 of 会 huì, 9 of 将 jiāng, and 3 of 将会 jiāng huì translate the verb will. The other source modal verb that these three forms have in common is would. What is also noticeable is that 21 instances of can, 6 of the verb end up and 4 of may are associated with 会 huì. The 58 instances of 会 huì that do not translate any overt English modal marker (Ø) need a tentative explanation, as they might represent attempts of explicitation of the source meaning. An analysis of the concordance lines for 会 huì reveals that in many such cases this modal translates statements which in English are couched in the simple present and indicate a general truth, which is either habitual or bound to happen, such as in examples (15) and (16) The addition of the modal disambiguates the original meaning and appears to make the Chinese version more transparent and therefore explicit. The analysis also suggests that in other cases the explicit translation of modality with 会 huì is triggered by the conditional meaning of the sentence it occurs in, such as in example (17) Finally, instances of 会 huì corresponding to no modal marker in the original text are found in clauses complementing the meaning of verbs such as 相信 xiāngxìn (see example 18). This verb translates the source text believe, which, like the verb hope discussed above, implies the speaker's attitude towards the future.
18. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future.
rénlèi sìhū bù zài xiāngxìn huì moreover humanity seemingly neg again believe can yǒu kuàilè de wèilái there.be joyful lig future The occurrences of 会 huì that translate English can and may are less unexpected and confirm that 会 huì shares with these English modals the semantic areas of participant-internal ability and epistemic possibility and probability, as illustrated by example (19): 15 This is in line with Chappell and Peyraube (2016, 306), who found that also the cognate Cantonese modal verb 會 wúih is highly compatible with conditional and counterfactual clauses. For more information about the relation between conditionals and modality, see Portner 2009, 247-57.  To sum up, with regard to the Encyclical Letter the semantic space of 会 huì, 将 jiāng, and 将会 jiāng huì covers the areas of epistemic possibility and probability and participant-internal willingness and intention. However, the hypothesised correspondence between will (shall) and these Chinese expressions is only partial, as the data reveals that they also cover the meanings conveyed by the English verbs can, end up, may, would and could. Finally, the large number of cases in which the three Chinese modal markers do not translate any overt English modals may be due to typological differences between the two languages, to the translator's attempt to make such modal meanings more explicit, or to both. Table 7 below shows how the 55 instances of cannot 16 and the 2 instances of may not are translated into Chinese. If used epistemically, cannot can be paraphrased as 'it is not possible that […]'. Not only is it used to negate epistemic can, but also epistemic must and may (see § 3). By contrast, epistemic may not can be paraphrased as 'it is possible that […] not', that is, it negates the truth of the proposition (Coates 1983, 100-2). When cannot expresses participant-internal ability, it can be paraphrased as 'inherent properties [do not] allow me to do it', while it takes on the meaning 'external circumstances [do not] allow me to do it', if it expresses participantexternal possibility (Coates 1983, 93).

Cannot and May not. Participant-Internal Ability and Participant-External Possibility
The translation choices 不能 bù néng (19 occurrences), 不可 bù kě (4 occurrences), 不可能 bù kěnéng (2 occurrences) were expected, as they are among the direct Chinese equivalents of cannot, covering its main semantic areas (e.g. Abbiati 2014, 213-14). By contrast, the negated form of 应 yīng (不应 bù yīng) (3 occurrences), the modal verb 必须 bìxū (2 occurrences), the cases of zero translation (5 occurrences), and especially 无法 wúfǎ (12 occurrences) were less predictable and deserve some attention. In particular, 无法 wúfǎ is a verb composed of two morphemes: the classic Chinese negative form of the modern Chinese verb 有 yǒu 'have', that is 无 wú, followed by its object 法 fǎ. Literally, it means 'to have no means of (doing something)', and therefore it mainly indicates lack of participant-internal ability and participant-external possibility.
The four instances of 不应 bù yīng represent a translation choice whereby the ambiguous use of English cannot is interpreted as explicit participant-external necessity 17 (see example 21).  The item 无法 wúfǎ also renders some instances of can used in combination with negative elements (e.g. the negative quantifier no and the adverb never), such as in example (25)  To conclude, in Laudato Si', 不能 bù néng straddles the areas of negative participant-external possibility and negative participant-internal ability expressed by cannot. By contrast, 无法 wúfǎ appears to be an indicator of negative participant-internal ability, 不可能 bù kěnéng of epistemic modality, and 不可 bù kě, 不应 bù yīng, 必须 bìxū of participant-external obligation, necessity or requirement (prohibition).

If an artist
The selective uses of these last modal expressions can be viewed as attempts to explicate the source meanings of cannot.

CALL. Participant-External Necessity, Obligation, and Requirement
Castello and Gesuato define the specific pattern 'someone is called to do something', used in the English version of Laudato Si', as "a nearmodal expression of obligation, which represents yet another linguistic realisation of the Pope's call for commitment to ecology and ecological spirituality" (2019,). An examination of the concordance lines for the instances of the lemma CALL (verb) revealed the presence of other patterns in which CALL (verb) is used, the most important of which are 'someone/something call(s) for something' and 'someone/something call(s) someone to'. These uses of call are reminiscent of citations from the Letters of Paul, such as "Christians are called to be saints" (Romans 1: 7) and "[…] yourself who are called to belong to Jesus Christ" (Romans 1: 6). They also recall phrases from the Gospel, such as "the call to repentance" (Luke 10: 13) and "the call to be a disciple" (Luke 14: 25). 18 Table 9 presents the renderings of the forms of CALL (verb) and CALL (noun) into Chinese. In the English version CALL (verb) totals 34 occurrences and CALL (noun) two. They are translated into Chinese as 召 zhào or its compound forms 召唤 zhàohuàn, 召叫 zhàojiào and 号召 hàozhào in twelve cases. Quantitatively speaking, therefore, in the Encyclical Letter 召* zhào* 19 represents the nearest semantic equivalent of CALL, and its use adds to the biblical and pastoral register of the text. According to the 现代汉语词典 Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (2014Cidian ( , 545-6, 1645, 召 zhào and its variant forms mean "call together, convene, summon someone" (our translation). Also the core meaning of 呼吁 hūyù and 呼唤 hūhuàn is similar to that of 召 zhào and indicate "appeal, call on somebody" and "call or shout to someone" (our translation). The twenty-four other renderings of CALL (verb and noun) in the text clearly represent less direct ways of rephrasing its core meaning. As can be seen, they are all modal verbs or no modal expression at all. The 14 instances of the verb form called are used as part of the passive construction 'someone is called to do something'. Only four of these are rendered in the passive voice in Chinese. It is interesting to note that in passive clauses only the monosyllabic form 召 zhào is employed after a passive marker, such as 被 bèi in example (29) Looking at how the lemmas CALL (verb) and CALL (noun) are translated as 召 zhào and its compound forms [tab. 9] does not provide a full picture of the meanings and functions they convey, as there could be other uses of them in the Chinese version which do not translate CALL (verb and noun) but other words. Table 10 explores this possibility: In short, in Laudato Si', the 'religious' quasi-modal CALL (verb and noun) is either turned into 召* zhào* or into an auxiliary verb conveying participant-external modality. Furthermore, four source 'religious' terms (e.g. vocation) are expressed with 召* zhào. Both the use of Chinese modal auxiliaries to render some instances of quasi-modal CALL and that of 召* zhào to translate specific Catholic religious terms can be viewed as instances of explicitation. That is, they can be interpreted as a way of spelling things out for the sake of clarity and for the benefit of the target Chinese readership, who might not be familiar with such concepts of the Catholic doctrine.

Conclusions
This paper has investigated the use of some of the most frequent modal expressions in the English and Chinese versions of the Encyclical Letter Laudato Si', a document in which the Pope presents possible scenarios due to climate change and directs his readership to action. Using corpus-based methods, word lists for both versions were obtained and checked for the most frequent English and Chinese modal expressions. A general quantitative analysis brought to light that the Chinese version contains a larger variety of modal auxiliaries than the English one, and a selection was made of frequent items covering different areas of modality. Subsequently, meaningful translation correspondences were investigated with the aim of defining their semantic space (research question one) and of detecting possible cases of explicitation (research question two). The first areas that were explored are epistemic probability and possibility and participant-internal willingness and intention, as prototypically expressed by will/shall in English and by their hypothesised main equivalent 会 huì. The analysis revealed further translation correspondences: i.e. that between will and 将 jiāng and 将会 jiāng huì to signal epistemic possibility and probability, and the one between will not and 无法 wúfǎ to express lack of participant-internal ability; finally, that between end up and 会 huì to indicate the end state of a situation. Furthermore, the frequent cases of 会 huì, 将 jiāng and 将会 jiāng huì that do not pair up with any overt modal expression in the original version lend support to the explicitation hypothesis. The second group of semantic areas investigated are lack of epistemic possibility or probability, lack of participant-internal ability, participant-external possibility and obligation conveyed by cannot and its predictable equivalents 不能 bù néng, 不可 bù kě, 不可能 bù kěnéng.
The main finding in this respect is the extensive use of 无法 wúfǎ to render instances of cannot mainly indicating lack of participant-internal ability. On the one hand, 不可 bù kě translates English modals expressing participant-external obligation and necessity, including shall not from biblical quotations. The third area under scrutiny was participant-external necessity, obligation and requirement, as conveyed by the near-modal CALL (verb and noun). The verb 召 zhào has proved to be its main translation equivalent in passive constructions, while its compound forms occur only in the active voice. The translation of the other instances of CALL (verb and noun) by means of Chinese modal auxiliaries of participant-external obligation/necessity stresses the deontic nature of these religious near-modal items. Finally, the rendering of religious terms such as summons and vocation with 召 zhào can be considered as attempts to explicate their meaning. Table 11 summarises the main results of the study and maps the most frequent English and Chinese modal expressions identified in Laudato Si' onto the semantic categories they belong to: This study has shown that even the translation of highly grammaticalised items like modal expressions need to undergo processes of interpretation and adaptation, which involve choosing a suitable expression or a combination of various linguistic resources to render a given meaning in the target text. This is especially true of the text type analysed in this study, i.e. a piece of writing about Catholic doctrine, with which the Chinese and the Taiwanese readerships might not be familiar. This study has also discussed cases of modal expressions in the target text that seem to explicate the modal meanings implicit in the source text. However, the extent to which this is not only due to typological differences between the two languages but also to specific translation choices is a matter of debate, and could be investigated further by other corpus-based studies.
The corpus-based analyses carried out in this study have revealed a network of semantically connected modal expressions which a close reading of the two versions of Laudato Si' would have hardly managed to bring to light. This method has helped us identify the linguistic choices made by the writer and the translator to convey the intended semantic meanings. Parallel concordancing software, such as the online corpus-analysis tool Sketchengine, 20 could help speed up this type of analysis, yet human scrutiny and judgement would still be needed. Future corpus-based research endeavours could explore modal expressions and other lexical, grammatical or semantic phenomena in larger corpora. Specifically, research on the translation/adaption of Catholic/religious writing into Chinese would benefit from the analysis of bigger parallel corpora of texts concerning the Catholic doctrine and the Holy Scriptures.