Changes in the modal domain in different varieties of English as potential effects of democratization

Kranich, Svenja; Hampel, Elisabeth; Bruns, Hanna

doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2020.101271

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…The data used here intersect with the independence of India from Britain (1947), the creation of its constitution and the installment of its democracy (1950), which makes such a shift in Indian values plausible, too. However, work by Kranich, Hampel, and Bruns (2020) on the pragmatics of requests in IndE shows that Indian speakers tend to be more direct in their demands (i.e., to use fewer modals) than other speakers, and more so when they assume a position of power, which goes against the behavior typically associated with democratization.…”

Section: Meanings and Usesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Diachronic Study of Modals and Semi-modals in Indian English Newspapers

Laliberté

2022

Journal of English Linguistics

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Although Indian English is the best-documented South Asian English, its diachronic development has not been described to a great extent. The present study begins to address this gap by offering a real-time perspective on the evolution of modals and semi-modals in Indian English. It sketches the changes in the frequency of modals and semi-modals in three corpora of Indian newspaper texts from 1939, 1968, and the early 2000s. Changes in the frequency of eleven modals and eleven semi-modals are found to be similar to the trends previously observed for written American and British English: semi-modals, as well as the modals can, could, and would, rise greatly in frequency. An analysis of the types of modality expressed by individual modal verbs provides in-depth insights into shifts in Indian English during the period. The study’s findings raise methodological and theoretical considerations for the diachronic study of modality in corpora in English generally: the increasing amount of direct quotation in news reportage partly accounts for a rise in modal frequency in this subgenre, which constitutes a confounding aspect seldom articulated in the study of newspaper language. Individual modal verbs exhibit different directions and speeds of change that are not reflected in the trajectory of modals as a category, demonstrating that an aggregate measure is not a suitable point of comparison between varieties to determine their degree of similarity or difference in terms of modal verb usage.

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Section: Meanings and Usesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Diachronic Study of Modals and Semi-modals in Indian English Newspapers

Laliberté

2022

Journal of English Linguistics

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“…By far, the most promising road to detect the use of words is to extract their patterns of behavior in comprehensively elicited national variety corpora (similarly expressed by Fuchs, 2020 in the delineation of first wave, second wave and third wave of world Englishes research). Foremost amongst such data resources for world Englishes have been ICE and GloWbE, which have provided an unprecedented range of datasets for an increasingly gigantic body of studies intended for an empirical account of observed innovations in world Englishes (Biermeier, 2008; Evans, 2015; Fuchs, 2020; Kranich, Hampel, & Bruns, 2020; Loureiro‐Porto, 2017; Schneider, 2004; Schützler, 2020, to name just a few).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A corpus‐based approach to Chinese English lexis

Qin

2021

World Englishes

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The study approaches the currency of Chinese English lexis from two perspectives. First, it creates a linguistic profile of 408 high‐frequency Chinese English terms extracted from the Chinese English Dictionary (CED) corpus by conducting a systematic coding and a statistical calculation of their linguistic features and by comparing the quantitative results with numerical distributions in the extant literature. Second, it evaluates the currency of 3484 Chinese English words in CED against six established corpora of world Englishes in GloWbE and ICE by calculating their frequency statistics in these six corpora and re‐evaluates the suitability of GloWbE and ICE for lexical variation by comparing the quantitatively different results generated by the two corpora. Findings of the study cast light on the tendencies of the linguistic behavior of the well‐assimilated Chinese English items and on the nature and feature of the variety data in GloWbE and ICE in the world Englishes scenario.

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Democratisation in the South African parliamentary Hansard? A study of change in modal auxiliaries

Kotze

Rooy

2020

Language Sciences

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Changes in the modal domain in different varieties of English as potential effects of democratization

Cited by 8 publications

References 41 publications

A Diachronic Study of Modals and Semi-modals in Indian English Newspapers

A Diachronic Study of Modals and Semi-modals in Indian English Newspapers

A corpus‐based approach to Chinese English lexis

Democratisation in the South African parliamentary Hansard? A study of change in modal auxiliaries

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