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... Using a variety of corpora, different researchers have observed the demise of deontically stronger modal verbs such as must and the concomitant rise of semi-modals such as have to and need to in recent British English, covering a time span overlapping with that of the present study. For example, an analysis of the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), covering the period between the 1960s and early 1990s, finds must to have been significantly supplanted by have (got) to in deontic use (Close & Aarts, 2010), and a substantial decline of must, may, and shall, particularly in informal face-to-face conversation (Bowie et al., 2013). However, the authors conclude that there is no neat explanation of underlying factors for these changes (Bowie et al., 2013:91). ...
This Element is a contribution to a new generation of corpus pragmatics research by taking as its starting point the multifaceted nature of speech acts in conversation, and by adopting a mixed-methods approach. Through a unique combination of theoretical, qualitative, quantitative, and statistical approaches, it provides a detailed investigation of advice-giving and advice uptake in relation to (i) the range of constructions used to give advice in different discourse contexts and at different points in time, and (ii) their interaction with dialogic and social factors of advice uptake as key components of frames of advice exchanges in natural conversation. Using data from the London-Lund Corpora of spoken British English, the Element shows, firstly, that there are systematic differences in advising between discourse contexts over the past half a century, and, secondly, that who gave the advice and how they did it are the strongest predictors of the advisee's response. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
... Myhill (1995) reports a partial replacement in American English of must, should, may and shall by HAVE to, got to, (had) better, ought (to), can and going to/gonna around the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865), suggesting a shift from "more 'principled'" to "more 'interactive '" modal functions (205), which he calls 'democratization'. Smith (2003) and Close & Aarts (2010) observe a similar trend in British English through the twentieth century. Perhaps another symptom of the preference for semi-modal structures over 'modal-like' forms is the expansion of NEED to and decline of 'NEED + bare infinitive' (Müller 2008). ...
The current restructuring of the English modal system has long been noted as an ongoing language change process. Semi-modal constructions such as 'BE going to' and 'HAVE got to' are textbook cases of grammaticalization. As grammaticalization comes with a rise in frequency, these semi-modals are also typical examples of the ‘reducing effect’ of frequency, which leads to the contracted forms 'gonna' and 'gotta'. These forms have in recent times become conventional in spoken English.
This book presents the first comprehensive corpus-based study of the use and development of the semi-modal contractions 'gonna', 'gotta' and 'wanna'. Focusing on American English, it considers synchronic data from spontaneous spoken language as well as diachronic data from a corpus of speech-purposed writing. The findings are complemented by data from an elicitation experiment, yielding insights into how listeners perceive these forms.
Beyond documenting the use of the contractions and full forms in American English, the book provides an investigation into the mental representation of the contractions between phonetic reduction and lexicality. An ‘emancipating effect’ of frequency is proposed by which the contracted forms move from reduction to lexicality, that is, they are increasingly used and perceived as lexical items independent of their source forms.
Resulting from these studies, five parameters of lexical emancipation are proposed:
- an increase in relative frequency (relative to the source form)
- a decline of reduction features
- a decline of social restrictions
- a semantic/functional divergence (from the source form)
- a structural divergence (from the source form)
Based on this, lexical emancipation can be described as a change by which the item proceeds through various stages, namely on-line phonetic reduction > on-line morpho-phonological fusion > stored pronunciation variant > stored lexical variant > independent lexical item.
... (Givón 1993: 187) [F]undamental changes are currently affecting the English auxiliary system. (Krug 2001: 309) In particular, semi-modals such as BE going to, HAVE (got) to, WANT to, etc. are currently on the rise in many contexts and across varieties, partly displacing the central modals (will, must, can, etc.) (Close & Aarts 2010;Millar 2009;Leech 2003;Krug 2000). It has also been argued that their increasing frequency has lead to the occurrence of contraction, i.e. the forms gonna, gotta, wanna (which led Krug (2000) to declare them the class of 'emerging modals'). ...
... It is worth mentioning here that a recent study conducted by Close and Aarts (2009), shows the decline in the usage of the core modal must in Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), and the significant increase in semi-modals of have to and have got to in present day British English. This change has inevitably affected both -epistemic‖ and -root‖ uses of must. ...
Research on corpora from the view point of language teaching textbooks has enabled researchers to examine the language to which learners are exposed to in order to develop more effective pedagogical materials for EFL/ESL learners. This has been done by many researchers comparing a textbook corpus with reference corpora or real-language corpora. However, all of these studies unanimously show that there is a lack of fit between grammar and textbook descriptions of the target language and real language use which lead us to believe that the language contained in textbooks is usually based on intuition and not on actual and attested use. To date, the focus of most pedagogic corpus-based research has been either on international type of textbooks, or on national textbooks mainly in EFL contexts. Surprisingly, however, English for General Purposes in ESL contexts has been the exception to this rule. Aimed at filling the existing gap by using a pedagogic corpus consisting of ESL Malaysian English language textbooks, this book tries to provide ample information about some of the most important features of the real language in use that went unnoticed in Malaysian English Language textbooks.
Penry Williams, C., & Korhonen, M. (2020). A sociolinguistic perspective on the (quasi-)modals of obligation and necessity in Australian English. English World-Wide, 41(3).
267–294. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00051.pen
This article examines the distribution and sociolinguistic patterning of
(quasi-)modals which express strong obligation/necessity, namely must, have to, have, got to, got to and need to, in Australian English. Variationist studies in other varieties of English have had contrasting findings in terms of distributions of root forms, as well as their conditioning by social and linguistic factors. The corpus analysis
suggests real-time increased use of need to and decrease in have got to through comparison to earlier findings. The variationist analysis shows quasi-modals have to, have got to and got to as sensitive to speaker age and sex, and a recent increase of have to via apparent time modelling. Linguistic conditioning relating to the type of
obligation and subject form is also found. The study contributes to sociolinguistic understanding of this large-scale change in English and the place of Australian English amongst other varieties
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/eww.00051.pen
The present work deals with changes in the English modals and analyses ongoing developments by means of corpora of mainly spoken English. By means of different quantitative and qualitative approaches this study shows how different stylistic, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic factors influence grammaticalisation processes.
The theoretical background includes a categorisation of modal verbs, gives an overview on previous studies in this domain and introduces theories about current language change. The analysis starts with chapter 3, which presents different frequency and semantic analyses of all modal auxiliaries, while chapters 4 – 6 focus on the modals of obligation. Chapter 4 deals with syntactic and semantic differences of the modals of obligation in British and American English, chapter 5 presents a variation analysis and chapter 6 introduces a discourse analysis. Chapter 7 summarises the most important results and their impact on future research in this domain. The study is based on previous works which have identified the English auxiliaries as a group of words undergoing rapid change with regard to their categorisation, frequency and semantic development (e.g. Bolinger 1980, Krug 2000, Leech 2003).
The English language has got two categories of verbs for the expression of modal semantics: The central (can, could, may, might, will, would, shall, needn’t and dare), and semi-modals have to, (have) got to, need to, be able to, be allowed to, be going to, want to, be supposed to and ought to.
This study builds on previous research observing drastic shifts in the modal system over the last thirty years, mainly based on written data, and elaborates on it with an examination of the recently developed DCPSE (Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English), making this study the first detailed real-time analysis of the changes in the modal auxiliaries in spoken English. This real-time approach offers the unique opportunity of studying three explanatory factors of current change identified by previous research, namely Americanisation, colloquialisation and democratisation in the context of grammaticalisation, which describes the long-term developments of modal auxiliaries. Data from other corpora such as ARCHER, ICE and CSAE provide additional information.
Various frequency analyses show that most changes are further advanced in spoken English and are interpreted as overall structural changes. However, the study also shows that some verbs develop differently in spoken and written English so that these differences have rather to be interpreted as genre-specific developments. While chapter 3 presents frequency and semantic analysis of all modal auxiliaries, the remaining chapters focus on the modals of necessity and obligation because recent changes are particularly evident among these forms, and these developments have often been related to shifts in society (democratisation).
Chapter 4 compares the frequency, syntax and semantics of the modals of obligation in British and American English conversation and confirms previous studies regarding Americanisation as a further advanced stage of development, which, however, is not necessarily due to direct language contact. The analysis also shows that extralinguistic and stylistic factors can have an impact on ongoing developments as, for example, differences in the use of (have) got to, in British and American English illustrate.
The variation analysis compares the use and functions of the modals of obligation in order to investigate the impact of semantic, pragmatic, social and stylistic factors in order to see to what extent the individual verbs are interchangeable. The analysis of the thirty-year period shows that there are shifts in frequency, but the different functions do not change significantly. Social factors do not have an impact on the variation either. Nevertheless, the analysis of subject and verb types illustrates how pragmatic factors can influence ongoing variation.
The last empirical chapter presents a discourse analysis, looking at individual verbs in their larger discourse context. The focus is on pragmatic, social and stylistic factors. The analysis of whole texts or longer text passages illustrates a number of factors which often remain unnoticed by quantitative methods only, and therefore complements previous research. All in all the discourse analysis demonstrates how flexible the system of modal verbs is, and it is this flexibility which instantiates change and grammaticalisation.
The goal of this chapter is to show how robust data from a large corpus of English from the 1900s to the 2000s can shed light on shifts in verbal syntax, in ways that might not be possible with smaller corpora. By way of introduction to this topic, we note that some languages have large historical corpora with robust data that allow researchers to look at a wide range of linguistic changes. For example, the Corpus del Español (www.corpusdelespanol.org) contains 100 million words from the 1200s to the 1900s, and the Corpus do Português (www.corpusdoportugues.org) contains 45 million words from the 1300s to the 1900s. Large corpora like these have been used to look at a wide range of changes in the language – lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic. (For a few examples dealing with infinitival complements, see Davies 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2008, 2010.) English corpus linguists, on the other hand, have tended to create much smaller corpora, in the belief that only ‘small, carefully-constructed’ corpora can be textually accurate enough to provide useful data. Examples of such corpora (from among many) are the 1.6 million word Helsinki Corpus, the 1.8 million word ARCHER corpus, and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), among others.
