This paper explores the various meanings/uses of NEED TO, a semi-modal of obligation and necessity, in two spoken and two written corpora of British English from the 1950s to the 1990s. Previous corpus-based studies indicate that its overall usage has increased, but there is clearly a gap in research on its semantics. This corpus-driven inductive investigation applies the traditional semantic concepts of root and epistemic meaning to the corpus data. The results suggest that NEED TO covers all the possible meanings/uses, both root and epistemic, of a modal of obligation and necessity. Consequently, it is a possible rival of MUST and HAVE TO in affirmative contexts. However, the traditional analysis leaves out the instances where NEED TO expresses internally motivated compulsion. This is accounted for in recent cross-linguistic studies which rearrange the non-epistemic field. Their insights are taken into consideration, and a synthesis concerning the semantic profile of NEED TO is suggested.
This paper explores need to, a semi-modal of obligation and necessity, and its semantic variation in connection with the sociolinguistic variables of gender, age and social class in the spoken demographic part of the British National Corpus. The semantic/pragmatic uses of need to include internal, deontic, dynamic and epistemic domains based both on traditional concepts and cross-linguistic studies. The sociolinguistic analysis applies the generalisations by Labov, but pays attention to the interactional styles and the communicative needs of the various social groups as well. The results reveal that need to is undergoing change. It shows monotonic distribution among adults, but it is slightly more common among men than women, and, in terms of social class, the upper middle class takes the lead. The semantic variation corroborates these findings – older speakers stick to the more traditional domains – but also reflects the gendered life stages and discourse styles of the speaker groups.
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