Change and continuity in the functions of the American English modals

Myhill, John

doi:10.1515/ling.1995.33.2.157

Cited by 79 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This choice may be interpreted as an indication of power. This finding is in line with that of Myhill (1995) who asserts that must is always associated with power.…”

Section: The Use Of Powersupporting

confidence: 92%

American Political Discourse as Manifested in Hillary Clinton's Interviews: A Critical Approach

Abdel-Moety¹

2014

ELR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The present study is concerned with American political discourse of interview genre. The study attempts an analysis of a number of TV interviews with the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It adopts a critical discourse analysis approach that draws on work from different disciplines, namely, genre theory, systemic functional grammar, and critical discourse analysis. The study aims at achieving a number of goals. First, it attempts to explore some characteristics of American interview genre. Second, it aims at depicting features of Clinton's political discourse. Third, it tries to unravel the use of power through language. Fourth, it aims at exploring the hidden strategies that are involved in conveying ideological messages. Results of the study indicated that American interview genre as exemplified in Clinton's interviews incorporates some characteristics of casual conversations such as the use of fillers, informal or casual style, humor, vocatives, grammatical incompletion, ellipsis, and deixis. They also showed that Clinton's discourse has certain specific features. These features include the use of long, compound and complex sentences, the strategic and manipulative use of personal pronouns and modality features, and the use of combination of elements of political discourse with ordinary life and experience. In addition, results indicated the use of power in the interviews. Finally, the analysis revealed Clinton's political and ideological positions through the use of specific analytical categories. These categories include lexicalization, implication, authority, evidentiality, consensus example/illustration, distancing, polarization, and national self-glorification.

show abstract

“…This choice may be interpreted as an indication of power. This finding is in line with that of Myhill (1995) who asserts that must is always associated with power.…”

Section: The Use Of Powersupporting

confidence: 92%

American Political Discourse as Manifested in Hillary Clinton's Interviews: A Critical Approach

Abdel-Moety¹

2014

ELR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…academic writing, tend to retain conservative features. These differences do not reflect a change in any grammatical rules but a shift in stylistic preferences due to such factors as colloquialization, wider acceptance of social dialects and the decreasing use of overt indicators of hierarchical relationships (see also Myhill 1995;Hundt et al 2002;Leech 2003;Smith 2003). These factors may have something to do with the increasing use of need to as well, and some comparisons will be made between registers.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The long-term decline of obligation must has even been connected to a change in the general world view. According to Myhill (1995) must is associated with unequal power, and as the American society has changed to a more equal one, obligation must has decreased in frequency. The same kind of process of democratization has also been suggested for British English by Leech (2003) and Smith (2003).…”

Section: The Domain Of Obligation and Necessitymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The semantic variation of NEED TO in four recent British English corpora

Nokkonen

2006

IJCL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…e.g. Lyons 1977;Quirk et al 1985;Myhill 1995;Swan 1998), their semantic makeup (cf. Coates 1983;Horty 2014), grammaticalization processes (cf.…”

Section: Rationale Scope and Objectives Of This Papermentioning

confidence: 99%

“It Would Never Happen in My Country I Must Say”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Study on Asian English Learners’ Preferred Uses of Must and Should

Kecskés

Kirner-Ludwig

2017

Corpus Pragmatics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper aims to investigate Asian English learners' preferred uses of the modal auxiliaries must and should by using both syntactic, topical and semantic annotation as well as various corpus linguistic tools. Our primary goal is to identify culture-specific motivations in the use of the two modal verbs and to demonstrate how those relate to the use of the two items in language produced by L1 speakers of English. We adhere to Hinkel's study (TESOL Q 29(2):325-343. 1995(TESOL Q 29(2):325-343. , doi: 10.2307 and her findings as a springboard into our analysis. She suggested that differences in the use of modals between Asian English learners (AELs) and English L1 speakers may be culturally founded. We see the essential need to question and deepen the understanding of such implications, arguing that a count of tokens and their correlation with essay topics alone cannot be sufficiently informative. This is why we pursue a more in-depth approach which combines both corpus and pragmatic tools. First of all, we will conduct a contrastive analysis of quantitative data from two different learners' corpora on the one hand, and three available corpora of contemporary English on the other hand. The goal of this analysis is to carve out certain AEL and/or English native speakers' patterns in using must and should in their deontic and epistemic senses. Secondly, we will evaluate the AEL data in regard to whether and how they reflect cultural values different from the ones expressed in native English speech. Our findings show that, whereas ENSs and AELs alike do demonstrate a preference in the less face-threatening modal should over the more direct must in deontic uses, both must and should tend to be used more deliberately and more purposefully by AELs than by ENSs, who seem to apply them much more vaguely and polysemously. With regard to Hinkel's major claim that AELs' use of must and & Istvan Kecskes

show abstract

Change and continuity in the functions of the American English modals

Cited by 79 publications

References 5 publications

American Political Discourse as Manifested in Hillary Clinton's Interviews: A Critical Approach

American Political Discourse as Manifested in Hillary Clinton's Interviews: A Critical Approach

The semantic variation of NEED TO in four recent British English corpora

“It Would Never Happen in My Country I Must Say”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Study on Asian English Learners’ Preferred Uses of Must and Should

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About