The English modals and semi-modals: Regional and stylistic variation

This paper reports a study of the uses of modal auxiliaries (can, may, will, shall,must, ought and need), plus a set of related semi-modals (need (to), have got (to),have (to), be going (to) and want (to)), in three parallel corpora of contemporary American, British, and Australian English. Quantitative findings relating to regional and stylistic variation are presented, and consideration is given to the possible influence upon the relative popularity of modal uses of ‘Americanization’, ‘colloquialization’ and ‘democratization’. It is suggested that these external processes provide possible explanations for, inter alia, the differing fortunes of the moribund shall on the one hand and on the other those of the popular semimodalsbe going to and want to, the relative popularity of deontic have to andshould over must, and the differing fortunes of must and have got to.