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Modality in New Englishes: a Corpus-Based Study of Obligation and Necessity

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Modality in New Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study of Obligation and Necessity Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philologischen Fakultät der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br. vorgelegt von Gabriela Veronica Diaconu aus Brașov SS 2011 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christian Mair Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Bernd Kortmann Vorsitzender des Promotionsausschusses der Gemeinsamen Kommission der Philologischen, Philosophischen und Wirtschafts- und Verhaltenswissenschaftlichen Fakultät: Prof. Dr. Hans-Helmuth Gander Datum der Fachprüfung im Promotionsfach: 24.01.2012 Contents List of tables IV List of figures V List of abbreviations VI Acknowledgements VIII 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Modal usage and change in progress in new standard Englishes: an overview 1 1.2 A corpus-based study of modal variation and change in progress 5 1.3 Aims and scope 9 2 The dynamics of the New Englishes 14 2.1 Introduction 14 2.2 Terminology and categorization 14 2.3 The New Englishes in linguistic research 17 2.4 Summary 20 3 The emergence of new standard Englishes in Ireland, Jamaica and India 21 3.1 Introduction 21 3.2 Irish English 22 3.2.1 The shift from Irish to English 22 3.2.2 Standard Irish English as a linguistic research area 23 3.3 Jamaican English 25 3.3.1 The creole-continuum model and the standard norm 25 3.3.2 English as an emerging standard in contemporary Jamaica 28 3.4 Indian English 31 3.4.1 The spread of English in India 31 3.4.2 Recent research in standard English in India 33 3.5 Summary 35 4 Theoretical and methodological background 37 4.1 Introduction 37 4.2 Previous research 37 4.2.1 Modal usage in British and American English 39 4.2.2 Modal usage in non-standard varieties of British English 46 4.2.3 Modal usage in other world Englishes 47 4.3 Data and methods of analysis 55 4.3.1 The corpora 55 4.3.2 Selected text categories in ICE 58 4.3.3 Data extraction: framing the variable context 61 4.4 Structural and sociolinguistic dimensions of changes in modal usage in world 64 Englishes I 4.4.1 Grammaticalization: explaining ongoing semantic and structural change 65 4.4.1.1 Unidirectionality, semantic change and subjectification 65 4.4.1.2 The role of frequency 69 4.4.1.3 Diachronic evolution of must, have to, (have) got to and need to 70 4.4.2 Discourse-pragmatic and sociolinguistic/socio-cultural processes 72 4.4.3 Other determinants: the contribution of the substrate and 73 prescriptivism 4.5 Basic distinctions: modality, modals and related terminology 77 4.5.1 Types of modal meaning 77 4.5.2 Modal auxiliaries vs. semi-modals 79 4.5.3 Subjective vs. objective modality 81 4.6 Limitations of the present study 86 5 Competing variants in ICE: description of trends 88 5.1 Introduction 88 5.2 Distribution of forms in the spoken section 89 5.2.1 Range of variation across formality level and certain text types 96 5.2.2 Morphosyntactic and stylistic characteristics in New Englishes 105 5.2.2.1 Syntactic motivation: have to and need to 105 5.2.2.2 Not negation vs. do negation 108 5.2.2.3 Contractions 112 5.3 Distribution of forms in written press texts 115 5.4 Summary 118 6 Semantic and contextual analysis 120 6.1 Introduction 120 6.2 Semantic contrast in the New Englishes: root vs. epistemic uses 121 6.2.1 Spoken dialogues 121 6.2.2 Written press texts 129 6.3 Root modality: description of sources in the New Englishes 131 6.3.1 Discourse-external sources: rules and regulations 133 6.3.1.1 Must 133 6.3.1.2 Have to 140 6.3.1.3 (Have) got to 144 6.3.1.4 Need to 147 6.3.2 Discourse-internal sources: speaker-imposition vs. personal opinion 151 6.3.2.1 Must 151 6.3.2.2 Have to 154 6.3.2.3 (Have) got to 158 6.3.2.4 Need to 161 6.3.3 Disentangling variation: discussion of corpus findings 164 6.3.3.1 Regional and stylistic trends 164 6.3.3.2 Subjective root necessity in New Englishes: a case of ongoing 175 II change? 6.4 The use of epistemic necessity 178 6.5 Summary 183 7 Root must and have to: a multivariate analysis 185 7.1 Introduction 185 7.2 Variationist approaches to language change 186 7.2.1 The importance of the linguistic variable 186 7.2.2 Root modality and binary logistic regression 187 7.3 Operationalizing the variables 190 7.3.1 Internal constraints defining the subject 191 7.3.2 Verb type 193 7.3.3 Internal factors: outer vs. inner circle 196 7.4 Multivariate analysis: results and discussion 198 7.4.1 Contribution of individual predictors 198 7.4.2 Interaction terms 201 7.5 Summary and conclusion 205 8 Conclusion 208 Appendices 215 References 219 III List of tables Table 4.1 The spoken text categories in ICE 59 Table 4.2 Register selection for the present study 59 Table 4.3 Discourse-internal vs. discourse-external sources of necessity 84 Table 4.4 The relationship between source of necessity and subjectification 85 Table 5.1 Variable ordering of strong obligation/necessity in spoken texts 94 Table 5.2 Distribution of modal must across private and public text dialogues 100 Table 5.3 Distribution of semi-modal have to across private and public dialogues 102 Table 5.4 Distribution of semi-modal (have) got to across private and public 104 dialogues Table 5.5 Distribution of semi-modal need to across public and private dialogues 104 Table 5.6 Distribution of syntactic vs. non-syntactic uses of semi-modal have to in 106 spoken dialogues from ICE-JA, ICE-India, ICE-Ireland, ICE-GB and SBC Table 5.7 Distribution of syntactic vs. non-syntactic uses of semi-modal need to in 107 spoken dialogues from ICE-JA, ICE-Indai, ICE-Ireland and SBC Table 5.8 Distribution of negated forms in spoken dialogues from ICE-JA, ICE- 108 India, ICE-Ireland, ICE-GB and SBC Table 5.9 Frequency of contracted variants for have to and have got to in the 113 spoken sections of the five corpora Table 6.1 Sources of root necessity in the present data 165 Table 6.2 Distribution of discourse-external sources of root necessity in percent 166 Table 6.3 Distribution of discourse-internal sources of root necessity in percent 166 Table 7.1 Explanatory variables and their coding for the multivariate analysis 189 Table 7.2 Distribution in percent of generic subjects with must and have to 196 according to GRAMMATICAL PERSON and VARIETY Table 7.3 Distribution in percent of definite subjects with must and have to 196 according to GRAMMATICAL PERSON and VARIETY Table 7.4 Distribution in percent of modals according to VERB TYPE in the spoken 197 dialogues ICE-JA, ICE-India, ICE-Ireland, and ICE-GB Table 7.5 Output of significant estimates predicting the odds for have to 198 Table 7.6 Selected interaction terms and output of significant estimates predicting 202 the odds for have to IV List of figures Figure 4.1 Comparison between inner and outer circle varieties 57 Figure 5.1 Overall distribution per 100,000 words of must, have to, (have) got to 90 and need to in the spoken dialogues Figure 5.2 Distribution of strong obligation/necessity per 100,000 words in private 97 dialogues (text files S1A-001 to S1A-100) Figure 5.3 Distribution of strong obligation/necessity per 100,000 words in public 97 dialogues (text files S1B-001 to S1B-080) Figure 5.4 Distribution of strong obligation/necessity per 100,000 words in written 116 press texts Figure 6.1 Distribution of root and epistemic meanings with must in per 100,000 123 words Figure 6.2 Distribution of root and epistemic meanings with have to per 100,000 125 words Figure 6.3 Distribution of root and epistemic meanings with (have) got to per 127 100,000 words Figure 6.4 Distribution of root and epistemic meanings with need to per 100,000 128 words Figure 6.5 Distribution of root necessity in written press texts per 100,000 words 129 Figure 6.6 Semantic change from objective to subjective modality in New 132 Englishes Figure 6.7 Distribution in percent of subjective have to with hedges (I think, I 170 believe etc.) Figure 7.1 Distribution in percent of grammatical person according to reference of 192 the subject in spoken dialogues from ICE-JA, ICE-India, ICE-Ireland, and ICE-GB Figure 7.2 Distribution in percent of verbs expressing accomplishments/ 195 achievements and activities/states in the spoken dialogues from ICE-JA, ICE-India, ICE-Ireland and ICE-GB V List of abbreviations AmE American English AusE Australian English BNC British National Corpus BrE British English Brown Brown Corpus of American English BSAfE Black South African English COLT The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language CookE Cook Island English EFL English as a foreign language EModE Early Modern English ENL English as a native language ESD English as a second dialect ESL English as a second language FijE Fiji English FLOB The Freiburg – LOB Corpus of British English FRED Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects Frown The Freiburg – Brown Corpus of American English HKE Hong Kong English KenE Kenya English ICE International Corpus of English ICE-GB International Corpus of English – Great Britain ICE-HK International Cropus of English – Hong Kong ICE-India International Corpus of English – India ICE-Ireland International Corpus of English – Ireland ICE-JA International Corpus of English – Jamaica ICE-SAfE International Corpus of English – South Africa ICE-T&T International Corpus of English – Trinidad & Tobago IndE Indian English IrE Irish English JamE Jamaican English JC Jamaican Creole VI LLC The London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English LModE Late Modern English LOB The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English ME Middle English ModE Modern English NZE New Zealand English OE Old English PhilE Philippine English SamE Samoa English SEU The Survey of English Usage SingE Singapore English SBC Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English SOV Subject-Object-Verb SVO Subject-Verb-Object TorE Toronto English WSAfE White South African English VII Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of so many people.
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