The modal verbs of English have been undergoing change since the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods. Recent research suggests dramatic recent developments, particularly in American English. In this paper, we focus on the encoding of obligation/necessity, which involves the layering of must, have (got) to, got to, and need to. Building on a longitudinal research program on (spoken) English dialect corpora, the present investigation examines data from a 1.5 million word corpus of the indigenous population of Toronto, Canada, the country’s largest urban centre. Variation analysis reveals that the system of obligation/necessity in this community has undergone nearly complete specialization to have to. Moreover, a comparison of these results with earlier studies suggests that the underlying system is organized differently than elsewhere. We argue that while change is sensitive to the social evaluation of forms, internal (grammatical) constraints may differ across major varieties. Canadian English appears to be on the forefront of change.
2014. In Search of L1 Evidence for Diachronic Reanalysis: Mapping Modal Verbs. Language Acquisition 21:1 ► pp. 103 ff.
Cournane, Ailís
2019. A developmental view on incrementation in language change. Theoretical Linguistics 45:3-4 ► pp. 127 ff.
Cournane, Ailís, Mina Hirzel & Valentine Hacquard
2024. Mapping modal verbs to meanings: an elicited production study on “force” and “flavor” with young preschoolers. Language Acquisition 31:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
Cournane, Ailís & Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux
2020. Leaving Obligations Behind: Epistemic Incrementation in Preschool English. Language Learning and Development 16:3 ► pp. 270 ff.
Cournane, Ailís & Dunja Veselinović
2022. If they must, they will: Children overcommit to likeliness inferences from deontic modals. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1
2019. Deriving Homogeneity in a Settler Colonial Variety of English. American Speech 94:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
DENIS, DEREK & SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE
2018. The changingfuture: competition, specialization and reorganization in the contemporary English future temporal reference system. English Language and Linguistics 22:3 ► pp. 403 ff.
Deuber, Dagmar
2010. Modal Verb Usage at the Interface of English and a Related Creole: A Corpus-based Study of Can/Could and Will/Would in Trinidadian English. Journal of English Linguistics 38:2 ► pp. 105 ff.
Dollinger, Stefan
2019. English in Canada. In The Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 52 ff.
DOLLINGER, STEFAN & SANDRA CLARKE
2012. On the autonomy and homogeneity of Canadian English. World Englishes 31:4 ► pp. 449 ff.
FEHRINGER, CAROL & KAREN CORRIGAN
2015. ‘You’ve got to sort of eh hoy the Geordie out’: modals of obligation and necessity in fifty years of Tyneside English. English Language and Linguistics 19:2 ► pp. 355 ff.
HANSEN, BEKE
2017. The ICE metadata and the study of Hong Kong English. World Englishes 36:3 ► pp. 471 ff.
2019. Semi-modal verb “Need to” and the modality of obligation “Must & Have to” in authentic corpus-based English. RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi► pp. 240 ff.
Leone, Ljubica
2022. A Corpus-based Investigation of Modals in Spoken British English: Gender Variation and Change in the Years 1994 and 2014. English Studies 103:8 ► pp. 1318 ff.
Lorenz, David
2013. On-Going Change in English Modality: Emancipation Through Frequency. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 43:1 ► pp. 33 ff.
2017. Coalescence and contraction of V-to-Vinf sequences in American English – Evidence from spoken language
. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 0:0
2014. On Necessity and Comparison. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95:4 ► pp. 512 ff.
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Lieselotte Anderwald
2017. Corpus‐Based Approaches to Dialect Study. In The Handbook of Dialectology, ► pp. 300 ff.
TAGLIAMONTE, SALI A.
2008. So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Canada. English Language and Linguistics 12:2 ► pp. 361 ff.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Derek Denis
2008. LINGUISTIC RUIN? LOL! INSTANT MESSAGING AND TEEN LANGUAGE. American Speech 83:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos
2023. Form and function covariation: Obligation modals in Australian English. Language Variation and Change 35:3 ► pp. 351 ff.
Walker, James A.
2009. New‐Dialect Formation in Canada: Evidence from the English Modal Auxiliaries by Stefan Dollinger. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13:2 ► pp. 269 ff.
Waters, Cathleen & Sali A. Tagliamonte
2017. Is One Innovation Enough? Leaders, Covariation, and Language Change. American Speech 92:1 ► pp. 23 ff.
Wood, Jim & Raffaella Zanuttini
2023. 11. Variation in Morphosyntax. Publication of the American Dialect Society 108:1 ► pp. 206 ff.
Yanovich, Igor
2020. Epistemic Modality. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, ► pp. 1 ff.
민수정
2012. EFL Learners’ Use of the Modals of Possibility in Cross-Cultural Communication: A Corpus-Based Account. The New Korean Journal of English Lnaguage & Literature 54:1 ► pp. 223 ff.
[no author supplied]
2011. References. In The Present Perfect in Non-Native Englishes, ► pp. 311 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Modal verbs. In Varieties of English, ► pp. 155 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.