This paper explores the various meanings/uses of NEED TO, a semi-modal of obligation and necessity, in two spoken and two written corpora of British English from the 1950s to the 1990s. Previous corpus-based studies indicate that its overall usage has increased, but there is clearly a gap in research on its semantics. This corpus-driven inductive investigation applies the traditional semantic concepts of root and epistemic meaning to the corpus data. The results suggest that NEED TO covers all the possible meanings/uses, both root and epistemic, of a modal of obligation and necessity. Consequently, it is a possible rival of MUST and HAVE TO in affirmative contexts. However, the traditional analysis leaves out the instances where NEED TO expresses internally motivated compulsion. This is accounted for in recent cross-linguistic studies which rearrange the non-epistemic field. Their insights are taken into consideration, and a synthesis concerning the semantic profile of NEED TO is suggested.
2017. The Semantic Field of Obligation in an English-Swedish Contrastive Perspective. In Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres [Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, 5], ► pp. 13 ff.
Depraetere, Ilse
2022. Sources of Modal Necessity: The Case of Needto’. Journal of English Linguistics 50:4 ► pp. 327 ff.
EunJooLee
2008. An analysis of corpus-based research on TEFL and applied linguistics.. English Teaching 63:2 ► pp. 283 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.
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.
Knyazev, Mikhail
2020. ‘Need’ with Accusative in Russian. Scando-Slavica 66:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
LOUREIRO-PORTO, LUCÍA
2010. Verbo-nominal constructions of necessity withþearfn. andneedn.: competition and grammaticalization from OE to eModE. English Language and Linguistics 14:3 ► pp. 373 ff.
2021. Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English. Text & Talk 41:5-6 ► pp. 763 ff.
Mair, Christian & Geoffrey N. Leech
2020. Current Changes in English Syntax. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ► pp. 249 ff.
Nokkonen, Soili
2010. ‘How many taxis there needs to be?’ The sociolinguistic variation of need to in spoken British English. Corpora 5:1 ► pp. 45 ff.
Sealey, Alison & Lee Oakley
2014. Why did the Canada goose cross the sea? Accounting for the behaviour of wildlife in the documentary series Life. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 24:1 ► pp. 19 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.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 february 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.