Modal verbs in TIME

Abstract

Between the 1960's and 1990's the frequency of modal verbs in the Brown family of corpora fell substantially, a decline which Leech (2003: 96) suggests is indicative of a more "general and long lasting trend". Taking Leech's study as a starting point, this paper investigates twentieth century changes in modal verbs using the new and relatively unexplored TIME Magazine Corpus. Results show that while certain modal verbs have fallen in frequency, the overall pattern is one of growth. These changes may be accounted for by the increase of semi-modal verbs and shifts in usage. Results appear to lend support to the explanatory hypotheses of colloquialization, democratization and stylistic change. Investigation of discrepancies between results from the TIME Corpus and the Brown corpora yields important methodological implications. In particular, as a result of sampling variation, a diachronic comparison based on two data points may present an inaccurate picture of the overall trend.

Grammatical Change Trends in Contemporary Czech Newspapers

“…Numerous papers on recent language change also report increasing informality of the newspaper register [1], [3], [8], [9], [12], [13], [14]. This is seconded also in this study and illustrated by the decrease of rather formal expressions, namely passive participles and adjectives derived from the present transgressive (cf.…”

“…It is often emphasised that research aiming to discover recent language change should be based on large and homogeneous data covered by many data points [9], [14]. This has determined selection of SyN v4 as the base corpus [11].…”

“…finally, the results as well as the limitations of such an approach are discussed. The paper draws on previous research done mostly on English trying to detect recent language change [1], [3], [8], [9], [12], [13], [14]. Compared to them, this study can be characterised by the following:…”

A Corpus Analysis of Changes in the Use of British and American English Modals and Semi-Modals

“…But this conclusion is not supported by an analysis of THC and COHA frequencies, in which must is observed to decline in both British and American English from 1810 to around 1920, after which the British use of must rises in comparison to the American use of must. Hundt's use of diachronic analysis prevented an identification of the actual pattern in the data, which only becomes apparent in the kind of time-series graphs used by Millar (2009).…”

“…One such scholar was Millar (2009), who used the TIME Magazine corpus to analyse changes in modal frequencies from 1923-2006. Millar's work contains an important observation, one that motivates the methodology of the present research : -a diachronic comparison based on two data points may present an inaccurate picture of the overall trend‖ (Millar, 2009, p. 191).…”