Changes in the modal domain in different varieties of English as potential effects of democratization

Publication date: Available online 29 January 2020Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Svenja Kranich, Elisabeth Hampel, Hanna BrunsAbstractOne well-investigated recent change in English that has been linked to democratization is the ongoing change in the modal domain, which is characterized by a decline of some of the core modals (such as may, might, must) and a rise of the so-called semi-modals (such as be able to, have to, have got to) (cf. Leech, 2003; Mair and Leech, 2006; Leech, 2013). This process is advanced to different degrees in different varieties of English (cf. Collins, 2009a/b). Although a correlation between a society's decreasing attention to social hierarchies and changes in the use of markers of modality is intuitively convincing, there is still a lack of empirical studies linking the two phenomena.The present paper represents a first step to fill this gap by combining corpus-based and variational pragmatic methodology. Focusing on three varieties of English (British, American and Indian English), we first investigate the frequency differences in the use of the core modals in GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web-Based English). This traditional corpus-linguistic approach is supplemented by the use of discourse completion tasks (DCTs) to collect instances of requests, a speech act in which deontic modals are likely to be used. By collecting data in the respective varieties from 172 speakers belonging to a younger and an older group, we can analyze synchronic variatio...
Source: Language Sciences - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research