This paper examines an area of ongoing change in English — deontic modality — and uses an archive of synchronic dialect data from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland to discover new information about its development. History records a cline in this system from must to have to to have got to. By taking a cross-dialectal perspective and utilizing comparative sociolinguistic methods we present a possible reconstruction of the later steps in this process. The results reveal dialectal contrasts in the proportion of older and newer forms, but similar patterns of use. Must is obsolescent and there is an unanticipated resurgence of have to alongside pan-dialectal grammatical reorganization: (1) have to is being used in contexts traditionally encoded by must and (2) have got to is specializing for indefinite reference. Young women are the leading edge in these developments suggesting that systemic adjustments in grammar combine with sociolinguistic influences to advance linguistic change.
2015. The refuge of a dying variant within the grammar: Patterns of change and continuity in the Spanish verbal periphrasishaber de + infinitive over the past two centuries. Language Variation and Change 27:1 ► pp. 89 ff.
Corbett, John
2014. Syntactic Variation: Evidence from the Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech. In Sociolinguistics in Scotland, ► pp. 258 ff.
2019. Deriving Homogeneity in a Settler Colonial Variety of English. American Speech 94:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
Depraetere, Ilse
2022. Sources of Modal Necessity: The Case of Needto’. Journal of English Linguistics 50:4 ► pp. 327 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.
Gardner, Matt Hunt, Eva Uffing, Nicholas Van Vaeck, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Stefan Th. Gries
2021. Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty. PLOS ONE 16:6 ► pp. e0252602 ff.
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.
2011. In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: general extenders in northeast England. English Language and Linguistics 15:3 ► pp. 441 ff.
SCHÜTZLER, OLE & JENNY HERZKY
2022. Modal verbs of strong obligation in Scottish Standard English. English Language and Linguistics 26:1 ► pp. 133 ff.
2012. Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice. Language Variation and Change 24:2 ► pp. 135 ff.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Derek Denis
2008. LINGUISTIC RUIN? LOL! INSTANT MESSAGING AND TEEN LANGUAGE. American Speech 83:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
TAGLIAMONTE, SALI A., MERCEDES DURHAM & JENNIFER SMITH
2014. Grammaticalization at an early stage: futurebe going toin conservative British dialects. English Language and Linguistics 18:1 ► pp. 75 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.
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