Quantitative analysis of forms used to express obligation/necessity in a variety of northern British English reveal that must is decreasing across generations. Instead of a marked increase in got to and gotta as reported for southern varieties of British English, these forms are used very little. Instead, there is stable variability between have to and have got to.
Multivariate analysis of internal and external factors contributing to the different forms demonstrates that have got to is favoured for generic statements, while have to is favoured for stative, personal statements. However, there is no significant effect of age or sex. It is suggested that have to and have got to both remain vigorous in this variety due to specialization of their respective functions.
2011. Grammatical change in the noun phrase: the influence of written language use. English Language and Linguistics 15:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
Denis, Derek & Alexandra D’Arcy
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.
Dollinger, Stefan
2006. The Modal Auxiliarieshave toandmustin theCorpus of Early Ontario English: Gradient Change and Colonial Lag. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 51:2-3 ► pp. 287 ff.
2006. “So cool, right?”: Canadian English Entering the 21st Century. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 51:2-3 ► pp. 309 ff.
Wolk, Christoph & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2018. Probabilistic corpus-based dialectometry. Journal of Linguistic Geography 6:1 ► pp. 56 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 april 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.