The syntactic and the semantic study of ought to in selected texts of the Holy Bible

Abstract EN

This study explores ought to as one of the modal auxiliaries in English.

Ought to is a special verb which behaves irregularly.

It is followed by the verb in the infinitive.

It is used to indicate modality.

It gives additional information about the function of the main verb that follows it.

It has a great variety of communicative functions.

For the sake of presenting and discussing ought to, the present paper aims at providing the syntactic and the semantic uses of this modal auxiliary.

Moreover, it tries to make an analysis of ought to in some religious texts of the Holy Bible.

These aims can be carried out through the following hypotheses: 1.Ought to may be applied to certain religious texts by analyzing the syntactic and the semantic aspects.

2.Different types of sentences tend to be used.

3.Ought to may be realized through a wide range of meanings.

The procedures to be adopted revolve around two sections: theoretical and practical.

The theoretical section deals with the investigating the syntactic and the semantic uses of ought to.

The practical one is concerned with analyzing some religious texts taken from the Books of the 'Old Testament' and the 'New Testament' in the Holy Bible.

The findings of the paper are summed up in the following conclusions: 1.Ought to can be applied to religious texts depending on two aspects of language.

2.Ought to is used with more than one sentence type such as: affirmative, negative and question.

3.Different meanings of ought to can be shown through this study.