‘How many taxis there needs to be?’ The sociolinguistic variation of need to in spoken British English

Abstract

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.

‘You’ve got to sort of eh hoy the Geordie out’: modals of obligation and necessity in fifty years of Tyneside English

“…Of all the semi-modals of obligation/necessity, need to is the least researched variant (Collins 2009: 57; Nokkonen 2010: 46). This might be due to the fact that it is a relatively new addition to the group, in that only in the last couple of decades has its frequency increased sufficiently in order to be able to place it on a par with have to and have got to .…”

“…In addition to the internal linguistic constraints outlined in section 3.2, it might also be the case that sociolinguistic factors play a role in determining the use of the modal variants. Age and sex have been repeatedly shown to be determining factors (Tagliamonte and Smith 2006, Tagliamonte 2013) though less work has been done on the interaction between different types of modal expression and social class (see Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007; Nokkonen 2010). 20…”

“…Less quantitative research has been carried out on social class in British English, as already noted, particularly as regards have (got) to . As for need to , Nokkonen (2010: 64) demonstrates that it is upper-middle-class speakers who use this form most frequently, and she argues that this is a function of their professional lives (see section 3.4 above).…”

“… 20 Synchronic analyses of variation and change incorporate age as a dependent variable so as to track changes in apparent time. Hence, Nokkonen (2010: 52) shows that younger speakers used higher frequencies of need to than her older participants did, demonstrating the increase in the use of the construction over time. Although Cukor-Avila & Bailey (2013) establish the pitfalls of using diachronic data like DECTE to uncover similar change in real time, our analysis thus far has already demonstrated that, these issues notwithstanding, there may well be changes in progress with respect to the expression of root modality in Northeastern English.…”

A socio­linguistic perspective on the (quasi-)modals of obligation and necessity in Australian English

“…(have) got to). For similar reasons, and also because of its increasing use(Nokkonen 2010;Fehringer and Corrigan 2015), need to was included even though it has been excluded in some earlier analyses. Note that the full forms are used to refer to a range of realisations such as has to, 've got to and gotta.…”