The expression of obligation/necessity in English is well documented from Old English to present day, with studies examining the morphosyntactic development of modal constructions (e.g. Denison 1993, Warner 1993), their... [ view full abstract ]
The expression of obligation/necessity in English is well documented from Old English to present day, with studies examining the morphosyntactic development of modal constructions (e.g. Denison 1993, Warner 1993), their semantic properties (e.g. Perkins 1983), or both (e.g. Coates 1983, Biber et al. 1999). Many of these studies focus on Standard American and British Englishes, though other varieties of English are increasingly being discussed (e.g. Trousdale 2003; Collins 2005, 2009; Tagliamonte & Smith 2006; Dollinger 2008; Fehringer & Corrigan 2015). Despite this broadening, rural communities tend to be underrepresented; we will add to this conversation by analyzing the English spoken in Nain, a geographically isolated Inuit community in northern Canada.
Existing studies of modality consistently show a rise in the use of semi-modals and a corresponding decline in modal verbs, regardless of the different combinations of modals and semi-modals under examination (e.g. Krug 2000, Leech 2003, Mair & Leech 2006, Close & Aarts 2010). Previous research also illustrates that epistemic meanings often develop out of deontic/root meanings as a result of ongoing grammaticalization (e.g. Van der Auwera & Plungian 1998, Traugott & Dasher 2002).
The present study is an apparent-time analysis of the use of deontic and epistemic modals (should, must) and semi-modals (have to, (have) got to, need to) in an age- and sex-stratified sample of 25 lifelong community residents. Preliminary analyses (N=401) show some similarities to previous studies but also some notable differences, which position Nain as being more similar to some rural, isolated communities in the United Kingdom (Tagliamonte & Smith 2006) than to larger, more urban communities. In Nain, we observe a significantly weaker preference for have to in both epistemic and deontic contexts (Collins 2005, Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2007). Correspondingly, there is an increase in the use of got to, which raises questions about transmission, drift, and lag, and there is a complete absence of have got to. We argue that got to is a reduced form of this variant (Collins 2009); as such, we also explore the different phonological realizations of got to, as a measure of grammaticalization for this variant.
