Should vs ought to pdf ebook

... distinctions.indd 106-107 Should vs Ought to 107 —(only for ought to) do-support vs absence of do-support —(only for ought to) infinitive marker to vs reduced (oughta) vs absent The quantitative... of ought to (cf Kennedy (2002)), which amounts to a should/ ought to ratio of 19:1.　Similarly, in Collins’s (2009) study (involving different corpora), the ratio of should to ought to appears to. .. observed from the table that should is much more frequent than ought to in the corpora, with a 9:1 should/ ought to ratio in the spoken corpus and a 36:1 should/ ought to ratio in the written corpus.　These

should vs Ought to*

Bert Cappelle and Gert De Sutter

University College Ghent / Ghent University

0 Preface

The seeds of this text were sown within Renaat Declerck’s ambitious

but unfinished project on mood and modality.　At one project work

meet-ing in 2006, one of us (B.C.) presented some quantitative findmeet-ings about

significant factors in the choice between should and ought to, based on a

fairly restricted data set (150 examples of each modal verb).　A mutual

comparison of the contributions of these factors was lacking, and this

pa-per is an attempt to provide this.　The idea of using an extensive set of

parameters to investigate the distribution of modal auxiliaries lay at the

heart of the modality project as formulated in its proposal.　In this sense,

the present paper is in the spirit of Declerck’s research aims

At the time, however, Declerck did not think that a multifactorial statis-tical analysis of the sort presented here would advance the project.　

Instead, he argued that larger sets of examples should instead be examined

with an eye to discovering rare or undescribed usage types.　For this

pa-per a set of examples more than three times the original size has been in-vestigated, but our primary aim is not to report special types.　Rather, our intention is to show that systematic analysis and coding of what is still a relatively restricted data set (approx 500 authentic examples of each

mod-al verb) can lead to confident conclusions about rarely described or

hither-to undetected usage trends which distinguish these two semantically close

lexical items

1. Should and Ought to: The Challenge

As the following sentences demonstrate, should and ought (to) can be

used as what appear to be stylistic variants of each other (1a, b), as mutual paraphrases to strengthen each other’s meaning (2a, b), and, most remark-ably, in tag questions as proforms for verb phrases containing the other verb, a possibility pointed out by Harris (1986: 353), Palmer (1990: 122), Perkins (1983: 55) and Swan (1995: 496)—though note that, for reasons

that will become clear, a tag with shouldn’t is more frequent than one with oughtn’t (3a, b):

(1) a Tina had no moral sense about this question, no feeling that

children ought to know who their fathers were or should be

fathered by the men their mothers lived with or were married

to.　(British National Corpus (henceforth BNC), written dis-course)

b Check the quality of the paper.　It should not be limp, shiny

or waxy and the heavily printed areas ought to feel crisp and

slightly rough.　(Cobuild corpus, Today Newspaper)

(2) a I’m not all that I should be and all that I ought to be, but by

this time next year I’m going to be a bit better than I am just now, in spiritual terms.　(BNC, spoken discourse)

* Many thanks go to Renaat Declerck for allowing the research within his final

proj-ect, on mood and modality, to be conducted from different theoretical and descriptive

angles.　This text, as well as the text by Ilse Depraetere in this volume, should prove

that such space for intellectual freedom can bear fruit which we hope will carry

Renaat’s approval.　For the implicit views on modality, this text has undoubtedly

bene-fited from the many e-mail exchanges and meetings with Ilse Depraetere, Susan Reed

and An Verhulst which took place within that project.　We are also especially grateful

to Marie Baert and Fanny Lauwaers, who coded the corpus examples of should and

ought to in written discourse as part of their course work for the 2006-2007 master’s

course Descriptive English Linguistics: selected Topics at K.U Leuven.　Finally, we

would like to thank Naoaki Wada for his helpful suggestions.　Any remaining

short-comings are our own

b It is all very well setting goals—but what if the very idea

causes psychological reversals, or the athlete’s logical mind

says they ought, should, could do it while their emotional

mind says it doesn’t want to?　(Cobuild corpus, UK books)

(3) a.　 Suppose I ought to tell him that shouldn’t I?

(BNC, spoken discourse)

b And yes, we should be mindful of Muslims’ sensitivities.　

But such mindfulness really should run both ways, oughtn’t

it?　(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/061590.php) Such examples appear to confirm the received opinion about the modals

should and ought to, namely that they are so similar in meaning that they

can typically substitute for one another.　For instance, Palmer (1990: 122)

writes, “It is not at all clear that (…) English makes any distinction

be-tween should and ought to.　They seem to be largely interchangeable.”　

In Collins’s (2009: 52-53) summary of the literature, similar sentiments

are expressed by Coates (1983: 69), Quirk et al (1985: 227) and

Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 186)

Both should and ought to can also be used as epistemic modals.　

Unlike in their deontic use, their function is then not to speak about

obli-gations or to offer advice but rather to express that the fulfilment of a

situ-ation is quite likely or can be reasonably expected given some (perceived)

facts.　For example:

(4) a Michael Saunders, UK economist at Salomon Brothers, said

that with output prices already falling sharply, underlying

in-flation should drop below 2.5 per cent by the middle of this

year.　(Cobuild corpus, The Times newspaper)

b After all that, some morale-boosting planetary aspects on the

16th, 18th and 22nd ought to make you glow again.

(Cobuild corpus, UK magazines)

In their epistemic use, should and ought to convey a weaker version of

logical necessity as expressed by must.　That means that they do not refer

to an inescapable conclusion.　Indeed, sometimes they are even used

when the likelihood of a situation is zero (in counterfactual situations);

they then merely express that there was a reasonableness of expectation, which the context makes clear is not borne out, as in the following exam-ples:

(5) a “You stupid fool,” he said aloud.　“It should be obvious

what’s happening to the Lands.　They’re dying.”

b “Why doesn’t the Thing know where to go?” said Gurder.　

“It could find Floridia, so somewhere important like

Blackbury ought to be no trouble.”

(BNC, written discourse)

Clearly, these examples show that should and ought to need not indicate

the speaker’s/writer’s supposition that the statement he makes is true.　

Quite often, an epistemic interpretation is mingled with a deontic one.　

Consider:

(6) a Unless you are going somewhere subtropical, a wet suit is essential, as is a “foamie”, a fat foam board specially

de-signed for beginners.　Any good surfing school should have

plenty of both.　(Cobuild corpus, The Times newspaper)

b Who’d like to tell me what twenty-six will be?　And then the

next number? Jody.　Come on nearly everybody ought to be

able to work this one out now.　Eleanor.　(…) That’s lovely.　

Can you all tell me together what twenty-eight will be?

(BNC, spoken discourse)

In (6a), there is both an epistemic sense (‘go to any good surfing school and you’re likely to find that they have plenty of both’) and a deontic sense (‘any good surfing school owes it to itself to have plenty of both’).　

Similarly, in (6b), the modal should in the teacher’s utterance is epistemic

(‘Since all these exercises are similar, I expect that this particular exercise will not pose any difficulty’) but it is undeniably tinged with a deontic reading (‘You’d better be able to work this one out, otherwise it’s clear to

me you haven’t paid any attention’).　Note, crucially, that in these

in-stances of purely epistemic use or ‘merger,’ should and ought to are again

interchangeable

Given the examples above and the generally accepted view that should

and ought to are semantically equivalent, the challenge is to establish on

which grounds, if any, should and ought to can nonetheless be

distin-guished

2 Differences Proposed in the Literature

We are not the first to rise to the challenge of finding differences

be-tween should and ought to.　Some linguists have been dissatisfied with

the generally acknowledged view that these modals are semantically

equivalent and have put forward claims about subtle semantic differences

That there are differences in meaning between should and ought to is

only to be expected.　Despite their different ancestry (should originally

being the past tense of shall and ought to the past tense of owe), the close

synonymy of should and ought to goes back to at least Old English (i.e

to before the mid-twelfth century), as appears from attested examples

adopted in the Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson (2000)).　The fact

that should and ought to have all this time been allowed to co-exist as

distinct forms occupying the same semantic patch “would seem to justify

the conclusion,” according to Visser (1963: 1637), “that they never had

exactly the same meaning, however closely synonymous they always have

been.”

Yet, exactly what distinguishes these two modals semantically is hard to

pin down.　In the following subsections, we will consider three proposals

made in the literature: (i) subjectivity vs objectivity, (ii) absence vs

pres-ence of an implication of non-fulfilment and (iii) relative frequency vs

in-frequency of epistemic reading

In a final subsection, we will consider some other, non-semantic,

differ-ences proposed in the literature

2.1 Subjectivity vs Objectivity

Echoing Swan (1980: 550), Declerck (1991: 377, fn 21) claims:

“Although should and ought to are often interchangeable, there is a slight difference of meaning between them.　When using should the speaker ex-presses his own subjective view; ought to is more objective and is used

when the speaker wants to represent something as a law, duty or

regula-tion.　For this reason ought to may sound more emphatic than should.”

Declerck offers the following contrast and accompanying comment, again loosely based on Swan (1980: 550):

(7) a You should / ought to congratulate her

b I ought to congratulate her, but I don’t think I will.　(should

would sound odd here: it would be strange to give yourself advice and then add that you were not going to follow it.)

(Declerck (1991: 377, fn 21)) Likewise, Collins (2009: 54) makes the claim (though without backing

it up with concrete figures) that while should and ought to are both “more

commonly subjective than objective (…) the proportion of objective cases

is higher with ought to.”　He calls a deontic modal “subjective” when it

“indicates what the speaker considers desirable, appropriate or right”

(Collins (2009: 45)) or when “the speaker is giving advice authoritatively

to the addressee” (Collins (2009: 54)) and “objective” when “the appropri-ateness or desirability of the course of action described stands independ-ently of the speaker’s endorsement” (Collins (2009: 45)), i.e., when “gen-erally accepted standards of appropriate behaviour are being invoked”

(Collins (2009: 54)).　A very similar distinction can be found in Myhill’s

(1996) study, who argues in detail that should expresses an individual opinion while ought to stresses that an opinion is shared by a group.　This

reference to shared opinion, associated with objectivity, can be further

linked to the claim that ought to, more strongly than should, suggests that

the obligation is a duty leading to the greater public good (cf Gailor (1983: 348); Aarts and Wekker (1987: 193))

It is hard to test the impact of subjectivity objectively: in individual ex-amples, it’s not always clear whether the source of modality is grounded

in the speaker/writer or in some speaker-external source.　We have used a

somewhat different notion of subjectivity in our corpus investigation:

whenever the modality (whether grounded in the speaker/writer or in

some other source) emanates from a personal viewpoint, it is subjective;

when the modal statement is issued without the speaker taking a personal

stance whatsoever, it is objective

One way of testing subjectivity indirectly but fairly reliably might be to

count the number of sentences in a corpus in which should and ought to

occur in a clause which is the complement of an expression of cognition

(assume, believe, feel, reckon, suppose, think, take the view, …).　It can

be hypothesised that if should is relatively more subjective and ought to

relatively more objective, sentences like i think you should leave are more

frequent than i think you ought to leave.

2.2.  Absence vs. Presence of a Non-fulfilment Implication

Ought to has been claimed to suggest that the actualisation of the

situa-tion referred to “is overdue or may be delayed” (Close (1981: 121)) or

that it might not take place at all (Gailor (1983: 348-349)), implications

which are thought to be absent with should.　As Westney (1995: 170)

re-marks, it could also be the reason why As you should know… is less

ag-gressive than As you ought to know … as an opener to give (superfluous)

information or advice, since the latter would impolitely suggest that the

hearer might not yet know

Support for Westney’s observation can be found in the relative

normali-ty of titles of websites or articles starting with “Ten things you ought to

know about…”: here the writer has a good motivation to assume or

sug-gest that the reader does not yet have the knowledge about the relevant

topic, since otherwise writing the text would be rather pointless

However, Westney correctly points out that the suggestion of

fulfilment is by no means always present with ought to, as is witnessed by

the following example:

(8) Whenever he got a chance, Malek broke into a canter, and one

of those bursts turned into a long twilight gallop; he may have

thought we were far from home and ought to get a move on…

(Leigh Fermer, Patrick (1986) Between the Woods and the

Water, Murray, London, quoted by Westney (1995: 168))

Non-fulfilment is therefore at best a (pragmatic) implicature rather than a

(semantic) implication (i.e entailment) in the strict sense

Sentences like (8), where actualisation of the situation can be deduced from the context, are rather exceptional, however.　Whether or not the sit-uation actually comes to fulfilment is not coded in the modal but is

usual-ly something to be derived extra-linguisticalusual-ly.　This neutrality with re-spect to actualisation especially holds when the proposition refers to a fu-ture situation (Palmer (1990: 123))

In Degani’s (2009: 338) corpus-based study of ought to, the majority of

sentences are indeed “non-factual” (rather than “actualised” or

“counter-factual”).　In such sentences, ought to simply conveys the idea that there

is a situation whose actualisation is considered desirable or expected.　It

is hard to verify via corpus research whether ought to in such cases, on

top of this notion of desirability or expectation, commonly suggests a

lesser likelihood of actualisation than if should had been used.　In fact, it

would not be a reliable method to check whether the likelihood of

fulfil-ment increases or decreases when replacing ought to by should in

individ-ual examples, since such judgments could only be made on a subjective basis

A more valid operationalisation would be to count the number of

in-stances of should and ought to followed by a perfect infinitive (e.g You

{should/ought to} have asked me first) or a present progressive (e.g i {should/ought to} be revising now), since these verb forms implicate

counterfactuality (but see section 5 for some complications)

2.3 Relative Frequency vs Infrequency of Epistemic Use

A number of linguists have claimed or reported that should conveys epistemicity more commonly than ought to does.　Coates (1983) reports

that the ratio of epistemic versus deontic uses is roughly 1:4 in the case of

should but only roughly 1:8 in the case of ought to.　This difference is

even more pronounced in Collins’s (2009) recent corpus counts, from

which we can infer an epistemic/deontic ratio of about 1:6 for should and

of about 1:32 for ought to.　According to Palmer (1987: 134), it is only

“theoretically possible to imagine ought to being used epistemically but

that seems very rarely to occur.　In general ought to is interpreted

deonti-cally.”　In Palmer (1990: 60) he even reports not to have found a single

example of epistemic ought to, although he acknowledges the existence of

cases of merger

In sharp contrast, Degani’s (2009: 333) corpus counts of ought to in the

FLOB and Frown corpora (representing 1990s English in the UK and the

US, respectively) reveal percentages as high as 31% and 36% for the

epistemic use.　Expressed as epistemic/deontic ratios (disregarding cases

of merger), this amounts to roughly 1:1.5 for UK English and almost 1:1

for US English.　Interestingly, Degani also shows that the epistemic use

of ought to seems to have increased in frequency since the early 1960s,

from 21% in the LOB corpus (UK English) and 24% in the Brown corpus

(US English), or from epistemic/deontic ratios of roughly 1:3 and roughly

1:5, respectively

We must conclude that the assessment of epistemic ought to differs

widely across studies, ranging from being only a theoretical possibility to

an interpretation which is as frequent as deontic ought to.　Degani’s

(2009) study only reports recent changes in the use of ought to, so our

study will complement her study by comparing the use of ought to with

the use of should in 1990s UK English.

2.4 Other Differences Proposed in the Literature

Apart from the semantic differences mentioned in the previous

subsec-tions, it has been noted that should and ought to differ in a number of

other respects

First, and most conspicuously, should is much more frequent in use

than ought to.　In the BNC, there are 111,237 occurrences of should but

only 5,979 occurrences of ought to (cf Kennedy (2002)), which amounts

to a should/ought to ratio of 19:1.　Similarly, in Collins’s (2009) study

(involving different corpora), the ratio of should to ought to appears to be

19:1

Second, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1983: 89) claim that

deon-tic should and deondeon-tic ought to contrast with each other in that the latter

is more informal (most markedly so if it is phonologically reduced to

oughta).　Not differentiating between deontic and epistemic uses, a similar

register-based difference for ought to has been noted by Collins (2009: 46): “Despite its small numbers in the present study, ought to was

found to be considerably more robust in British and American speech than writing,” with the speech/writing ratios being roughly 3:1 and 4:1,

respec-tively.　(The number of epistemic uses of ought to was too low in

Collins’s study to allow a comparison between speech and writing.)

Collins (2009: 52) also notes that should is much more evenly distributed across speech and writing, but that “deontic should shows a stronger

ten-dency to be associated with the written word (…) than does epistemic

should.”　This might be somewhat surprising, given that ought to has

been shown to be in serious decline (e.g Leech (2003))—one usually ex-pects to encounter archaic linguistic items in the written rather than the spoken mode.　But note that many remnants of older language phases which have long disappeared from the standard language can be preserved

in dialects, which are by their nature also informal

Finally, it has been stated that “unlike should, ought to occurs mostly in

positive statements, not in negative and interrogative sentences” (Harris (1986), Aarts and Wekker (1987: 193))

3 The Present Study: Data, Parameters, Methodology 3.1 Data

For both modals, should and ought to, we made sure that at least 500

occurrences in context were extracted from corpora of British English.　

Half of the occurrences are from the spoken part of the BNC, which was searched with the accompanying SARA software.　Oddly, the software did not allow us to select all the written texts in the BNC in any obvious way, which led to the decision to use another corpus, the Cobuild corpus, for which we selected all the written subcorpora with British English

lan-guage material.　A difference between the BNC and the Cobuild Corpus

is that a search for should and ought in the BNC also yielded instances of

shouldn’t, shoulda, oughtn’t and oughta, whereas these forms had to be

looked up separately in Cobuild.　We made sure that the number of

exam-ples of these forms extracted from Cobuild matched the proportion of the

number of base forms to the total occurrences in the corpus (about 1% for

should, about a third for ought).　Table 1 provides an overview of the

to-tal number of hits for each search term and the number of hits actually

extracted.　Obviously, all hits we extracted for our investigation were

chosen randomly

Table 1: Corpus Finds and Number of Examples Extracted for All

Search Terms

It can be observed from the table that should is much more frequent than

ought to in the corpora, with a 9:1 should/ought to ratio in the spoken

corpus and a 36:1 should/ought to ratio in the written corpus.　These

fre-quencies confirm the general predominance of should and the relative

in-formality of ought to mentioned in section 2.4.

Removed from the data were sentences which were severely anacoluthic

and non-interpretable, as well as sentences such as those in (9)-(13),

con-taining should in a sense in which it simply could not be replaced by

ought to:

(9) a. I should like to ask Mick regarding the long service

ambu-lance personnel.　(BNC, spoken discourse)

b. I should say it’s convenient for neither I should imagine.

(BNC, spoken discourse)

c When’s dad coming back?—I don’t know yet, I should think

it’ll be by the end of the month.　 (BNC, spoken discourse)

d I should sincerely hope not.

(Cobuild corpus, Times newspaper)

(10) a Let me know if you need anything, or if someone close to

b Always try and make up a working prototype of your ideas

should an inspection be requested.

(Cobuild corpus, UK magazines)

(11) … and I think it is absolutely critical that we should be

devot-ing our attention er, to policdevot-ing that catches criminals and

(12) a Yes, interesting you should say that, because the definition I

had was something quite the reverse

(BNC, spoken discourse)

b It is so cruel that such a thing should happen to such a nice,

c It may be coincidence that you should choose to write to me

now when what you dearly want is within reach

(Cobuild corpus, sun newspaper)

d That Oxford and Cambridge should be capable of sustaining

such a profile in the professional era is to the credit of those who run the university clubs

(Cobuild corpus, Times newspaper)

(13) So the point of conclusion is if the myth is different in the Bible then the likely explanation is that it was tampered with, but that the scribes and the people who wrote the Bible altered

the … and they changed it round why should they change this

The reason why such sentences were excluded is that we only wanted to

find factors which favour the choice for should or ought to in sentences in which they both could in principle occur.　In (9a-d), should is used as an

alternative to would after the subject i.　In (10a, b), should is used in a

conditional clause to add a sense of tentativeness, i.e to suggest that the

speaker doesn’t think the actualisation of the situation is highly likely.　In

(11), should is used in a that-clause depending on an expression of

neces-sity.　In this sentence should alternates with the present (‘mandative’)

subjunctive.　However, we did include most of the sentences in which the

modal occurs in a that-clause complementing an expression of suggestion,

advice and even occasionally necessity, since we can observe that ought

to is not wholly excluded from such contexts (although grammars do not

record this usage):

(14) a Indeed by this time Mao is specifically advocating that the

Party ought to take a more cautious and less radical

ap-proach to land reform so as to not antagonize the interests of the middle and rich peasants.　 (BNC, spoken discourse)

b It almost seems unfair to require that the computer ought to

be able to do things that the programmer has not foreseen

(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/computers-with-a-mind-of-their-own-709785.html)

In (12) above, should is used in content clauses occurring with

expres-sions indicating a (typically emotion-fuelled) personal opinion.　In such

sentences an indicative form could generally be used instead of should,

but by using should, the speaker indicates that he considers the mere idea

of something as surprising or remarkable.　A somewhat related use

con-cerns should after why to suggest that the speaker can’t see any obvious

reason for actualisation of the situation; cf (13), where ought to would

have been odd.　Yet, most sentences with why were retained since, again,

it can be found that ought to is not completely impossible in this context,

in so far as failing to see a reason for something is often tantamount to

failing to see a (deontic or epistemic) need or necessity for it:

(15) a There is absolutely no reason why film technicians ought to

be expected to work for less than, say, a shelf stacker in a

b I don’t see why it ought to be a high turnout election.

(Corpus of Contemporary American English) The purification of our corpus examples resulted in an actual data set of

461 examples with should and 494 examples with ought to.　As can be

inferred from the above discussion, deciding whether an example should

be expunged or retained was not always an easy matter.　We have been as conservative as possible, thus leaving in perhaps more examples than

oth-er researchoth-ers would have done.　All in all, we do not think this jeopar-dises the replicability of our study

3.2 Parameters Investigated in This Study

To the best of our knowledge, this paper investigates the potential im-pact of the largest number of parameters (i.e variables) ever considered in the comparison of two modal verbs.　These are listed below, grouped for convenience by a few headings (but different groupings are of course pos-sible)

Semantic parameters:

—deontic vs epistemic vs merger

—subjective (stance-taking) vs objective (no stance-taking)

— time reference (modality is situated in the past) vs no past-time reference

Properties of the subject:

— 1st vs 2nd vs 3rd person

— animate vs inanimate

— agentive (subject control over action) vs non-agentive (lack of subject control)

Properties of the verb following the modal:

— dynamic vs stative

— present tense vs perfect tense

perfect: contracted (’ve, sometimes spelled of) vs

contracted

— simple vs progressive

— active vs passive

Syntactic properties of the clause:

— code (use of modal to substitute entire VP, e.g You should!) vs

no code

— extraposition of the subject (e.g it should be noted that…) vs

no extraposition

— position of an adverb (if there is one) before (e.g You really

ought to…) vs after the modal (You should really…)

— clause type: embedded by think or a similar expression of cogni-tion (assume, believe, feel, it seems to me, …)

—clause type: embedded by suggest or a related item (advocate,

advise, argue, consult, insist, legislate, recommend, request, require, persuade, stipulate, etc.; also nouns like suggestion/

proposal (that) and periphrastic constructions like think it wise (that) and it is appropriate/essential (that))

—polarity: positive vs negative

— negation: external (e.g You shouldn’t be frightened = ‘It’s not necessary to be frightened’) vs internal (e.g This

privi-lege should not be abused = ‘It is necessary not to abuse

this privilege’)

—negation: contracted (-n’t) vs non-contracted

— negation: negative raising (e.g i don’t think you ought to

say that) vs otherwise

— negation: negative subject (e.g No marriage ought to be

contracted on this day) vs otherwise

— negation: near-negative (e.g We should only…) vs

other-wise

—declarative vs interrogative (including dependent questions, e.g

[boys who worry about] what moisturiser they should be us-ing)

—introduced by why (or a covert form, as in There’s no reason

_ teenagers shouldn’t earn pocket money) vs otherwise

—subject-operator inversion vs no subject-operator inversion

—coordination of modals (e.g What the trial judge can and

should do…) vs no coordination of modals

—(only for ought to) do-support vs absence of do-support

—(only for ought to) infinitive marker to vs reduced (oughta) vs

absent The quantitative results for these individual parameters are provided in the tables presented as addenda.　Remember, however, that the primary aim of this study is to discover which factors have a unique contribution

to the selection of should vs ought to.　Perhaps paradoxically, this can

only be achieved by considering all the parameters together: only then can

we know whether a parameter has a unique impact or whether it has to be disregarded because its effect correlates strongly to that of another param-eter whose impact is stronger (and which should therefore be retained, un-less it in turn correlates with a yet stronger parameter).　Exactly how such

a multivariate analysis proceeds is explained in the next subsection

One additional semantic parameter (‘counterfactuality’) was later on as-sembled on the basis of two of the above parameters: if the verb follow-ing the modal was either a full perfect auxiliary or the progressive

auxil-iary be, the modality was considered to convey counterfactuality

fulfilment); otherwise it was not.　For a motivation of this operationalisa-tion, see section 2.2, but see also section 5 for further discussion.　The reason why only full perfect auxiliaries but not contracted ones were as-signed the value ‘counterfactual’ was that we knew, at the time we assem-bled this variable, that contracted perfect auxiliaries occur significantly

more frequently after should than after ought to, while we suspected, on

the basis of the linguistic literature, that a suggestion of non-fulfilment

oc-curs especially frequently with ought to.　If we had included contracted

auxiliaries in the set of ‘counterfactual’ examples, a possible impact of

counterfactuality on the choice of should vs ought to would therefore

have been harder to detect, because it might have been cancelled out by the impact of contracted auxiliaries.　The parameter ‘aspect’ (simple vs

progressive infinitive after the modal auxiliary) was removed from the analysis after assembling the parameter ‘counterfactuality,’ and the param-eter ‘tense’ then acquired a purely morpho-phonological interpretation (presence or absence of a reduced perfect auxiliary)

3.3 Methodology

In order to find out which of the parameters mentioned above

contrib-utes significantly to the should/ought to variation in English, we fitted a

so-called logistic regression model.　This technique, which is very popular

in sociolinguistic circles (cf Goldvarb; Sankoff, Tagliamonte and Smith

(2005)), is a multivariate analysis method that measures the simultaneous

effect of one or more parameters, which may be categorical and

continu-ous in nature, on a binary outcome (in this case should vs ought to).　By

means of such a multivariate technique, significant variables can be

distin-guished from non-significant ones and the relative impact of each of the

significant variables is estimated (i.e the impact of parameter X while

controlling for the effects of all other parameters included in the model).　

Finally, such techniques can yield insight into the descriptive, explanatory

and predictive power of the resulting model (i.e., to what extent can the

observed variation be described, explained and predicted by the

explana-tory variables).　The statistical package R 2.7.0 (R Development Core

Team (2008)) was used to conduct this statistical analysis

Before presenting the results of the logistic regression model, some

re-marks have to be made.　First, for technical reasons, we reorganised

pa-rameters with more than two values, as well as papa-rameters where one of

the two values led to one or more further distinctions, to single-level,

bi-nary parameters.　In doing so, we grouped those values together which

had a similar effect on the should/ought to variation, or to put it somewhat

differently, which maximised the difference between the values of the

non-binary parameters.　Thus, for the parameter polarity, we decided to

regroup the values such that each sentence could be assigned either of two

values: (i) negative polarity with the negation marked on the modal

auxil-iary (i.e should not / ought not to / shouldn’t / oughtn’t to) or (ii) positive

polarity or negative polarity which is not marked on the modal auxiliary.　

Second, we did not include any interaction effects in the model, since

pre-paratory analyses pointed out that such a model is corrupted by

multicol-linearity.　More particularly, the estimates of the interaction terms

corre-lated heavily with the main terms, as a consequence of which the

esti-mates became unstable.　Third, some of the parameters mentioned in the

previous section had to be removed from the model, as preparatory analy-ses revealed that their effect correlated heavily with the effect of other rameters (yielding a new multicollinearity problem).　In particular, the pa-rameters animacy, agentivity, dynamicity, sentence type (declarative vs

interrogative), voice (active vs passive) and presence of why were

exclud-ed for that reason.　For instance, the parameter sentence type correlatexclud-ed with inversion, and the parameter voice (active vs passive) correlated with agentivity, which correlated with meaning (deontic vs epistemic or merger) and with animacy, which in turn also correlated with person.　In choosing which of the correlating parameters should be retained, we opted for the parameters with the strongest effect on the variation at hand.　This

way, we ensured that the resulting model of the should/ought to variation

only contained parameters with a unique impact on the variation and no parameters whose effect is redundant to that of another parameter

4 Results

Our statistical model, made up of 14 non-correlating parameters, fits the data well (p = 0.14).　This means that there is no reason to assume that there is a discrepancy between the variation accounted for by the model and the actual (observed) variation.　The model’s predictive power, how-ever, is rather low (c = 0.69, a value closer to 0.5 (no predictive accuracy) than to 1 (full predictive accuracy)).　Table 2 provides an overview of the retained parameters, ordered by individual strength (as expressed by the odds ratio)

Starting from the base-line expectation that should and ought to have an

a priori equal chance of being selected (i.e., controlling for the overall

higher frequency of should compared to ought to noted in section 3.1), we

can read the results in Table 2 as follows

First, in sentences with inversion between the subject and the operator

(e.g {should we / Ought we to} do that?), should is more than twelve

times as likely to be selected compared to when there is no inversion.　

This effect is highly significant

Second, when the word following the modal is a contracted perfect

auxiliary (’ve, sometimes spelled of, as in You {should / ought to} {’ve /

of} told me), the likelihood of that modal being should is ten times higher

than when the following word is not a contracted perfect auxiliary.　This

effect is highly significant

Third, when there is no adverb or when it is positioned between the

(verbal part of the) modal and the to-infinitive (as in You {should probably

/ ought probably to} ignore this), that modal is almost four times as likely

to be should compared to when there is an adverb before the modal (as in

You probably {should / ought to} ignore this), in which case of course the

likelihood of that modal being ought to is more than four times as likely

(compared to when there is no adverb or an adverb right before the

infinitive).　This effect is significant at the 0.05 level

Fourth, when the polarity is negative and expressed by means of not

or -n’t following the (verbal part of the) modal (as in We {shouldn’t /

oughtn’t to} do this), that modal is almost three times as likely to be

should compared to when the modality is positive (as in We {should / ought to} do that) or negative without the negation being marked directly

on the modal (as in i don’t think we {should / ought to} do that).　This

ef-fect is highly significant

Fifth, when the modal proposition is a complement of suggest or a sim-ilar expression of suggestion, advisability, etc., should is almost three

times as likely to be selected compared to when the modal proposition is not embedded by such an item.　This effect is significant at the 0.01 level

Sixth, when there is no past time reference (as in Listen to me, you

{should / ought to} get some tests done), should is more than twice as

likely to be selected compared to when there is past-time reference, as is

the case in the corpus sentence Then my father told me i ought to get

some tests done and the polyps were diagnosed (Cobuild corpus, Today

newspaper).　This effect is highly significant

Seventh, when the modal proposition is not a complement of think or a similar expression of cognition, should is more than twice as likely to be

selected compared to when the proposition is embedded by such an item

(as in i think you {should / ought to} give it a try).　This effect is highly

significant

Eighth, when the subject of the modal proposition is a third person (as

in he {should / ought to} apologise), should is almost twice as likely to

be selected compared to when the subject is a first or a second person (as

in {i / you / we} {should / ought to} apologise).　This effect is highly

sig-nificant

All other parameters are not significant—notably, this is the case for meaning (epistemicity/merger vs deonticity) and for counterfactuality—or were left out of the model because they correlated with one or more of the other parameters

5 Discussion

Our model of the unique factors governing the choice between should and ought to allows us to describe this variation fairly parsimoniously in

terms of eight significant factors and six more factors whose impact turns

Parameter and Its Setting for Selection of should Odds Ratio Significance

Adverb: none or right after the auxiliary 3.9 *

Modal proposition embedded by an item like suggest: yes 2.7 **

Modal proposition embedded by a cognition item: no 2.1 ***

Table 2: Statistical Model of the Variation between should and Ought

to, with Predictors for should, Odds Ratios and Significance

Levels (‘***’: p < 0.001; ‘**’: p < 0.01; ‘*’: p < 0.05; ‘n.s.’:

not significant); ‘n.a.’ = not applicable