English Verbs Tenses and Modal Verbs of Social and Humanities Academic Texts from COCA

Comprehending English verb tenses (EVT) and modal verbs (MV) is crucial for L2 academic writing. This study aims to analyse EVT and MV occurrences from a significant corpus, The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The field of study’s primary focus comprises social and humanities disciplines, primarily language, literature, and education. This study also explores how EVT and MV are generated from the corpora presented inside and outside Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL). Corpus linguistics was employed as the methodology of this study. COCA data were retrieved following the determined academic texts. The academic text results were annotated using CLAWS Free Tagger. Further, the annotated data were inputted into the AntConc software. C7 tagsets were entered alternately to make the desired tenses accessible from the corpus. The findings revealed that each discipline comprised the base form of the lexical verb, past tense of the lexical verb, -ing participle of the lexical verb, infinitive, past participle of the lexical verb, -s form of the lexical verb, and modal verb. However, the frequencies of EVT and MV were different in each discipline. When compared against Coxhread’s AWL, some of the EVT came from the most frequent of 1 sublist to the least frequent of 10 sublists. Meanwhile, EVT outside the existing AWL could be the new academic word list for each discipline. Furthermore, theoretical and practical implications are further elaborated in this study.