Double modals in Australian and New Zealand English
Morin, Cameron; Coats, Steven (2023-12-18)
John Wiley & Sons
18.12.2023
Morin, C., & Coats, S. (2023). Double modals in Australian and New Zealand English. World Englishes, 00, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12639
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
© 2023 The Authors. World Englishes published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
© 2023 The Authors. World Englishes published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-202312213986
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-202312213986
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
This paper reports the first large-scale corpus study of double modal usage in Australian and New Zealand Englishes, based on a multi-million-word corpus of geolocated automatic speech recognition transcripts from YouTube. Double modals are considered rare grammatical features of English, which have long been extremely difficult to observe in natural language due to low frequencies, non-standardness, and restriction to oral speech registers. In addition, it has generally been assumed that they make up small sets of diachronically related forms, whose geographical distribution is mainly restricted to the Southern US and the North of the UK. Our results challenge these long-standing assumptions by presenting the first inventory of double modals observed outside of these regions, thanks to computational sociolinguistic methods. Overall, we identify and map 474 double modal tokens distributed in 51 types, an unexpectedly large collection of forms used with varying frequencies across Australia and New Zealand. We consider the relevance of our results for three specific new claims concerning the diversity, complexity, and origins of double modals in English world-wide.
This paper reports the first large-scale corpus study of double modal usage in Australian and New Zealand Englishes, based on a multi-million-word corpus of geolocated automatic speech recognition transcripts from YouTube. Double modals are considered rare grammatical features of English, which have long been extremely difficult to observe in natural language due to low frequencies, non-standardness, and restriction to oral speech registers. In addition, it has generally been assumed that they make up small sets of diachronically related forms, whose geographical distribution is mainly restricted to the Southern US and the North of the UK. Our results challenge these long-standing assumptions by presenting the first inventory of double modals observed outside of these regions, thanks to computational sociolinguistic methods. Overall, we identify and map 474 double modal tokens distributed in 51 types, an unexpectedly large collection of forms used with varying frequencies across Australia and New Zealand. We consider the relevance of our results for three specific new claims concerning the diversity, complexity, and origins of double modals in English world-wide.
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