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.
2024. Mapping modal verbs to meanings: an elicited production study on “force” and “flavor” with young preschoolers. Language Acquisition 31:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
Lorenz, David & David Tizón-Couto
2024. Coalescence and contraction of V-to-Vinf sequences in American English – Evidence from spoken language
. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Nie, Chunyuan
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.
2023. Form and function covariation: Obligation modals in Australian English. Language Variation and Change 35:3 ► pp. 351 ff.
Wood, Jim & Raffaella Zanuttini
2023. 11. Variation in Morphosyntax. Publication of the American Dialect Society 108:1 ► pp. 206 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
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.
Morin, Cameron & Carmelo Alessandro Basile
2022. Elicitation and experimentation: implications for English sociolinguistics. Anglophonia :34
Palayon, Raymund T., Richard Watson Todd & Sompatu Vungthong
2022. From the temple of life to the temple of death: keyness analyses of the transitions of a cult. Corpora 17:3 ► pp. 331 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.
2020. Epistemic Modality. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, ► pp. 1 ff.
Denis, Derek & Alexandra D’Arcy
2019. Deriving Homogeneity in a Settler Colonial Variety of English. American Speech 94:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
Dollinger, Stefan
2019. English in Canada. In The Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 52 ff.
KIZILAY, Yeliz
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.
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.
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.
2012. On the autonomy and homogeneity of Canadian English. World Englishes 31:4 ► pp. 449 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.
Aaron, Jessi Elana
2010. Pushing the envelope: Looking beyond the variable context. Language Variation and Change 22:1 ► pp. 1 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.
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.
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.
[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 2 july 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.