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Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions: Categories, co-text, and context
Edited by Pascal Hohaus and Rainer Schulze
[Studies in Language Companion Series 216] 2020
► pp. 311–342

Chapter 12
“The future elected government should fully represent the interests of Hongkong people”

Diachronic change in the use of modalising expressions in Hong Kong English between 1928 and 2018

| University of Würzburg
| University of Würzburg
| University of Würzburg
The modal system of English in its development provides an ideal perspective on language variation and change. Since the sociocultural and socio-historical situation in specific postcolonial communities promotes diversity among New Englishes, it is likely to also affect their modal systems. In this paper, we seek to identify patterns in the use of modalising expressions in Hong Kong English in relation to topic, genre and the larger socio-historical context. Our diachronic study of the frequency and function of selected modal verbs in press news reports from the DC-HKE reveals a peak in the use of back-shifted will and deontic should between 1988–1992 that seems to be closely linked to developments of the genre and socio-political changes in Hong Kong.
Keywords: Hong Kong English (HKE), diachronic, corpus linguistics, newspaper discourse, socio-political context
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The socio-historical background: History, politics and genre development
    • 2.1History and politics in Hong Kong: The last 90 years
    • 2.2Press coverage in Great Britain and Hong Kong from a historical perspective
  • 3. Methodology
    • 3.1The DC-HKE and its press news reports section
    • 3.2Functionality of the core modals would and should
      • 3.2.1The functionality of would
      • 3.2.2The functionality of should
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overall frequencies
    • 4.2The functionality of would in the DC-HKE
    • 4.3 The functionality of should in the DC-HKE
    • 4.4 Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 12 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.216.12bie
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