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Article In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Modelling gradience in necessity modal variability

Evidence from situational and collocational constraints

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Abstract
This study extends the variationist corpus-based exploration of necessity modals (must, have to, need to) to English as a lingua franca (ELF). It introduces a methodological framework for modelling gradient information in situational and collocational variables while accounting for the fluid and complex nature of ELF. The framework is tested using Bayesian multilevel regression on 2,789 tokens from spoken and written academic ELF corpora. The analysis examines whether and how orderly heterogeneity can be identified in a complex multilingual context. The results show that modal choice in ELF is systematic and primarily driven by situational factors, with linguistic constraints playing a consistent but secondary role. The analysis further reveals that the influence of the collocational constraint, represented as verb-modal association, is non-linear and asymmetric. These findings provide quantitative evidence that ELF modal choice is functionally and lexically sensitive, extending orderly variation beyond native speaker and second language varieties of English.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Constraints on necessity modal variation
    • 2.1Subject-related constraints
    • 2.2Discourse level constraints
    • 2.3Collocational constraints
  • 3.Data, variables, and statistical modelling
    • 3.1Data and variants
    • 3.2Measuring verb-modal association
    • 3.3Other variables
    • 3.4Statistical modelling
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overview of the results of statistical modelling
    • 4.2Situational variation
    • 4.3Collocational variation
    • 4.4Control variables
    • 4.5Random effects
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Data availability
  • Notes
  • References
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