Recent research on modals and quasi-modals has identified two complementary trends: a rise in the popularity of quasi-modals and a decline in that of modals. There is a strong tendency for American rather than British English to be leading the way in these developments. Furthermore, quasi-modals are thriving in speech, their modal counterparts in writing. This chapter investigates the distribution of a set of semantically similar modals and quasi-modals in a set of matching components of the International Corpus of English. The findings suggest, inter alia, that in the “Inner Circle” it is American English that is predominantly in the box seat in the rise of the quasi-modals and the decline of the modals, and that in the “Outer Circle” it is the more established Englishes that tend to be more advanced in these trends. Keywords: modal; quasi-modal; New Englishes; corpus
2024. Exploring variation in English as a lingua franca: Multivariate analysis of modal verbs of obligation and necessity in the VOICE corpus. ICAME Journal 48:1 ► pp. 49 ff.
Collins, Peter
2023. Modals and Quasi-Modals in English World-Wide. Journal of English Linguistics 51:3 ► pp. 265 ff.
Laliberté, Catherine
2022. A Diachronic Study of Modals and Semi-modals in Indian English Newspapers. Journal of English Linguistics 50:2 ► pp. 142 ff.
Mair, Christian & Geoffrey N. Leech
2020. Current Changes in English Syntax. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ► pp. 249 ff.
Bohmann, Axel
2019. Variation in English Worldwide,
Collins, Peter & Xinyue Yao
2019. AusBrown: A new diachronic corpus of Australian English. ICAME Journal 43:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
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