The present study has shown considerable fluctuation in the textual frequencies of modal verbs and related semi-modal constructions in six corpora of written BrE and AmE covering the greater part of the 20th century. Much of the observed variation is statistically significant at robust levels, but only a part of it points to processes of long- term structural change, that is the type of change likely to ultimately affect all varieties.
To put it polemically, we must ask how much of the statistically significant patterning found in any diachronically layered set of corpora may be trivial in terms of a theoreti- cally motivated explanation of structural change.
Where, as in the modals of obligation and necessity, there is a long history of grammaticalisation and layering and the trends are broadly comparable across variet- ies, “four-star” significance ratings (as they were obtained for the decrease in must and
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140 Christian Mair
the increase in have to) constitute statistical evidence which points towards genuine structural change.
A similarly robust statistical pattern was noted for will, which displayed signifi- cant regional contrasts between BrE and AmE at two out of three diachronic sampling points (B-LOB vs B-Brown, F-LOB vs Frown) and an almost equally robust (though not quite synchronous) diachronic decline in BrE and AmE. In this case, however, it is less clear what to conclude from this significant pattern in the corpora with regard to language history beyond-the-corpus. Given the disproportionate frequencies, it is not useful to explore whether the modest rise in going to is part of the explanation of the fall in the frequency of will. In the case of will, the differences in the Brown-family corpora, whether regional or diachronic, do not add up to a coherent trend, but are for the most part due to fluctuation in all those common uses which were as perfectly acceptable, widespread and ordinary in the AmE of the 1930s as they were in the BrE of the 1990s.
A rather practical problem we have encountered in the corpus-based real-time analysis of grammatical change is the question of how to determine the time windows for observation – a decision which has obvious repercussions on raw frequencies and significance testing. The extended Brown family has three diachronic sampling points covering two successive thirty-year intervals. In this set-up, it is not possible – as it is in COHA – to produce a decade-by-decade documentation of diachronic developments.
Shorter intervals, on the other hand, are more likely to produce statistical outliers.
But given the time it typically takes for a syntactic change to run its course, the entire thirty-year time window opened by the Brown family may turn out to be an outlier. If we observe contrary developments in two consecutive thirty-year intervals, are we to interpret this as a change followed by a reversal or as stability with random fluctuation in the full sixty-year period? How can we map accelerating or decelerat- ing rises or falls on to the appropriate segments of the S-shaped trajectory of change (Denison 2003) which our theoretical model of the spread of innovations leads us to expect? Or are these accelerations or decelerations themselves artefacts of the corpus?
The unexpected rise in the frequency of must from B-Brown to Frown and the equally unexpected slow-down in the spread of going to from LOB to F-LOB could be cases in point.
For the recent history of BrE and AmE numerous and diverse corpora are avail- able to introduce the necessary checks and balances. Biases introduced by any single one of them will be levelled out or at least discovered when several databases are used for comparison. For many New Englishes, on the other hand, the working environ- ment for diachronic corpus-linguistics is still relatively poor, and the problem thus remains serious.
After having stated the caveats, however, we can move on to summarise a number of confirmed results which have emerged from the analysis of modality in the extended
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comCross-variety diachronic drifts and ephemeral regional contrasts 141 Brown family. The working hypothesis is that these 20th century developments in the two supervarieties will generally have parallels in the New Englishes. Where no such parallels are found, the developments in the supervarieties serve as comparative bench- marks for specific local tendencies in the global English Language Complex.
The modal verbs as a category are still firmly entrenched in (written) BrE and AmE, although three among them – must, may and shall – have significantly decreased in frequency, and one marginal member of the class – need with full auxiliary syntax – has become moribund. One semi-modal, be to, has also decreased in frequency. All the other semi-modals are either stable or robustly increasing, most prominently have to, want to and – starting from very low levels but spreading at fantastic rates – need to.
For have got to, which is one of the few semi-modals to display pronounced regional variation but rare in written data, spoken corpora of the New Englishes are needed for a full analysis.
What the present study has generally shown to be weak and transient is regional contrasts between BrE and AmE. On the other hand, there are robust and consistent diachronic trends for several modals and semi-modals, which usually hold for the lon- ger term both within and across varieties. Beyond that, it should be pointed out that – like Bowie et al. (2013) and Noởl & Van der Auwera (this volume) – the present study started out as an attempt to describe diachronic trends in the grammar, but was soon confronted with considerable genre-dependent variability as a confounding factor.
The twin insights derived from an analysis of modals and semi-modals in the extended Brown family of corpora, namely that:
– with very few exceptions regional contrasts in the use of modals and semi- modals across varieties of English are embedded in more important diachronic drifts and are therefore generally temporary and ephemeral, and
– diachronic investigations in any variety of English must carefully control for genre as a potentially powerful distorting factor
are as likely to hold for the New Englishes as for BrE and AmE. The clear priority for future research on modality in the New Englishes is thus the compilation of histori- cal and generically stratified corpora of as many of these varieties as possible, and an initiative such as Noởl, Van Rooy and Van der Auwera’s (ed. 2014) collection of studies on Diachronic Approaches to Modality in World Englishes is a promising beginning.
References
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Biewer, Carolin. 2011. Modal auxiliaries in second language varieties of English – a learner’s perspective. In Exploring Second-Language Varieties of English and Learner Englishes: Bridg- ing a Paradigm Gap [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 44], Joybrato Mukherjee & Marianne Hundt (eds), 7–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/scl.44.02bie
Bowie, Jill, Wallis, Sean & Aarts, Bas. 2013. Contemporary change in modal usage in spoken British English: Mapping the impact of ‘genre’. In English Modality: Core, Periphery and Evidentiality, Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Marta Carretero, Jorge Arús Hita, & Johan van der Auwera (eds), 57–94. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Collins, Peter. 2009a. Modals and Quasi-modals in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
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Collins, Peter & Yao, Xinyue. 2012. Modals and quasi-modals in New Englishes. In Mapping Unity and Diversity World-wide: Corpus-based Studies of New Englishes [Varieties of Eng- lish around the World G43], Marianne Hundt & Ulrike Gut (eds), 35–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/veaw.g43.02col
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Deuber, Dagmar. 2010. Modal verb usage at the interface of English and a related creole: A corpus-based study of can/could and will/would in Trinidadian English. Journal of English Linguistics 38: 105–142. DOI: 10.1177/0075424209348151
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Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110820980
Leech, Geoffrey. 2003. Modality on the move: The English modal auxiliaries 1961–1992. In Modality in Contemporary English, Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, & Frank Palmer (eds), 223–240. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16: 547–564. DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.16.4.05lee
Leech, Geoffrey, 2013. Where have all the modals gone? On the declining frequency of modal auxiliaries in American and British English. In English Modality: Core, Periphery and Evidentiality, Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Marta Carretero, Jorge Arús Hita & Johan Van der Auwera (eds), 95–115. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Leech, Geoffrey & Smith, Nicholas. 2005. Extending the possibilities of corpus-based research on English in the twentieth century: A prequel to LOB and F-LOB. ICAME Journal 29:
83–98. DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00206
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Appendix: Tests for statistical significance – log likelihood values
Following the practice in Leech et al. (2009), the log likelihood test was employed to assess degree of statistical significance, using the calculator developed by Paul Rayson at UCREL, Lancaster, UK (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html). Comparability across corpora is dis- torted in very minor ways by the fact that full certainty about the corpus sizes used for nor- malisation per million words cannot be obtained from published sources. Token frequencies for B-LOB and Brown, i.e. the two corpora not considered in Leech et al. (2009) and investi- gated independently in the present study, were established with the help of WordSmith 5.0.
For LOB and Brown, it seemed reasonable to use the figures given in Leech et al. (2009: 26), which are rather close if not precisely identical to the ones obtained when computing absolute frequencies from the normalised ones given in Leech et al. (2009), Leech & Smith (2009) or (Leech 2011). Leech et al. (2009) do not explicitly state figures for the absolute size of F-LOB and Frown, which is why these were obtained from the Manual for the tagged versions of the four original corpora ( Hinrichs et al. 2007: 12 [print version] or p.201 [digital version]). Thus, the calculations presented in Tables A to D below are based on the following measures for corpus size:
– B-Brown: 1,015,206 words – B-LOB: 1,028,155 words – Brown: 1,013,546 words – LOB: 1,006,863 words – Frown: 1,011,585 words – F-LOB: 1,009,394 words.
A: Frequency of core modals in B-LOB, LOB and F-LOB
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comCross-variety diachronic drifts and ephemeral regional contrasts 145 B-LOB
(1930s) LOB
(1961) Log lik. F-LOB
(1991) Log lik. Log lik.
60 years
would 2673 3032 ****30.74 2682 ****22.34 0.63
will 3055 2822 *5.01 2708 2.65 ***15.00
can 2039 2147 *5.51 2213 0.84 **10.69
could 1433 1741 ****36.73 1767 0.13 ****41.35
may 1702 1333 ****37.59 1100 ****22.94 ****119.50
should 1486 1301 **8.72 1148 **9.95 ****37.49
must 1265 1147 3.67 814 ****57.66 ****90.49
might 713 779 *4.47 640 ***13.99 2.71
shall 475 355 ***14.99 200 ****44.26 ****110.36
ought (to) 135 103 3.67 58 ***12.86 ****30.19
need(n’t) 94 76 1.55 44 **8.72 ****17.63
Corpus size 1,028,155 1,006,863 1,009,394
B: Frequency of core modals in B-Brown, Brown and Frown B-Brown
(1930s) Brown
(1961) Log lik. Frown
(1992) Log lik. Log lik.
60 years
would 2412 3053 ****76.41 2868 *5.43 ****41.08
will 2606 2702 1.90 2402 ****17.07 **7.60
can 1718 2193 ****58.61 2160 0.19 ****52.08
could 1332 1776 ****64.37 1655 *4.04 ****36.16
may 1357 1298 1.22 878 ****80.77 ****101.75
should 1037 910 **8.08 787 **8.69 ****33.49
must 955 1018 2.12 668 ****72.51 ****50.0
might 626 665 1.24 635 0.64 0.10
shall 289 267 0.84 150 ****33.05 ****44.28
ought (to) 111 69 **9.82 49 3.37 ****24.44
need(n’t) 49 40 0.90 35 0.32 2.29
Corpus size 1,015,206 1,013,546 1,011,585
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146 Christian Mair
C: Frequency of semi-modals in B-LOB, LOB and F-LOB B-LOB
(1930s) LOB
(1961) Log lik. F-LOB
(1991) Log lik. Log lik.
60 years
be able to 247 246 0.03 248 0.10 0.06
be going to 205 248 *5.04 245 0.01 *4.45
be supposed to 33 22 1.99 47 **9.80 2.76
be to 494 451 1.25 376 *5.33 ***13.95
(had) better 23 50 **10.80 37 1.69 3.60
(have) got to 31 41 1.61 27 2.62 0.20
have to 505 757 ****56.07 825 4.52 ****84.60
need to 20 53 ****16.17 194 ****88.53 ****167.45
want to 259 357 ****17.78 423 **7.06 ****43.33
Corpus size 1,028,155 1,006,863 1,009,394
D: Frequency of semi-modals in B-Brown, Brown and Frown B-Brown
(1930s) Brown
(1961) Log lik. Frown
(1991) Log lik. Log. lik 60 yrs
be able to 189 191 0.01 202 0.33 0.48
be going to 170 216 *5.57 332 ****24.97 ****53.54
be supposed to 46 48 0.05 55 0.49 0.82
be to 425 344 **8.42 217 ****28.67 67.88
(had) better 20 41 **7.41 34 0.64 3.70
(have) got to 36 45 1.02 52 0.52 2.96
have to 362 627 ****72.32 639 0.14 ****78.20
need to 35 69 ***11.38 154 ****33.40 ****81.12
want to 277 323 3.61 552 ****61.08 ****93.51
Corpus size 1,015,206 1,013,546 1,011,585
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doi 10.1075/scl.67.07mey
© 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company
Passives of so-called ‘ditransitives’
in nineteenth century and present-day Canadian English
Matthias L.G. Meyer
University of Kiel
This study focuses on the double-participant verbs assign, bring, deny, give, grant, offer, send, serve, sell, show and teach, and the competition between first passives (He was offered the job), second passives (The job was offered him) and passives with a prepositional complement (The job was offered to him) in matching corpora of 19th century and Present-day Canadian English. The verbs display individual preferences for the first passive and the prepositional construction and the acceptability of their second passives also varies. All in all, the 19th century corpus reveals a clear dominance of passives with a prepositional complement over first passives, whereas the reverse is the case in the contemporary corpus.
The second passive is shown to have been a minority form already in the 19th century and to be even rarer today.1
Keywords: Canadian English; passivisation; ditransitives; 19th century
1. Introduction
The present paper studies grammatical change in Canadian English (CanE) by looking at competing passives of eleven verbs that govern two participants: assign, bring, deny, give, grant, offer, send, serve, sell, show and teach. When the participants are realised as two NPs as in They gave [NP1 Mary] [NP2 the keys], NP1 and NP2 are commonly interpreted as an indirect and a direct object respectively (hence also the popular label
‘double-object construction’) and are called ‘ditransitive’ (see e.g. Quirk et al. 1985:
§16.55f; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 248). As this analysis is not shared here, the term
1. I should like to thank Peter Collins as well as my anonymous reviewers for various helpful suggestions. I am also indebted to Margret Popp (Würzburg) for her comments on Old English as well as to Graham Howard, Peter Imsdahl and my wife Christine for proofreading the manuscript. Any remaining errors or inadequacies are of course entirely mine.
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148 Matthias L.G. Meyer
‘ditransitive’ has only been used within quotes in the title and the theory-neutral term
‘double-participant verb(s)’ will be used here instead when the group of verbs that allows both a double-NP and an alternative prepositional construction is addressed as a whole and when individual grammatical differences between its members are not at issue.
The functional analyses undertaken here will conform to a syntactic model that I call ‘Passivisable Object Theory’ (PO Theory) which stipulates that objects must be passivisable by definition. Its finer details are outlined in Meyer (2009, 2012); here, its discussion will be limited to a required minimum (see Sections 4.2 and 4.3), as the major part of this paper is targeted at presenting empirical corpus findings comparing different types of passives in 19th century and Present-day CanE. It will be argued that certain changes in passivisability that verbs of the give-type have undergone reflect true grammatical change that should become manifest in terms of a differentiated analysis of their complements. Though the corpus data employed here do not go back beyond the 19th century, the passives under investigation have been in competition since Old English and a short historical introduction thus seems in order.
In what follows, the term ‘first (direct) passive’ is applied to the pattern She was given the book and the term ‘second (direct) passive’ to its less frequent alternative The book was given her. Both types relate to the active construction ‘Verb – NP1 – NP2’ and differ in that first passives have NP1 (typically the person) as subject whereas second passives have NP2 (the usually inanimate participant) as subject. Both are direct (i.e.
prepositionless) constructions, and can be contrasted with what I will call ‘(first) prep- ositional passives’ such as The book was given to her where the beneficiary is encoded in the form of a PP.