Naturalistic Double Modals in North America

Abstract

Double modals are a well-known non-standard feature of some regional varieties of English in North America, but due to their rareness in spoken language, questions remain as to the inventory of possible combinatorial types and the geographic extent of their use in contemporary naturalistic speech. This study investigates double modals in the Corpus of North American Spoken English (CoNASE), a 1.2-billion-word corpus of time-stamped and geolocated automatic speech recognition (ASR) YouTube transcripts from the United States and Canada. Double modal sequences were identified in the corpus using regular expressions, then verified via manual examination of videos. The study represents the first large-scale, continent-wide analysis of double modals based entirely on recent naturalistic production data, rather than data such as elicited responses or sentence acceptability judgments, and it demonstrates a larger double modal inventory and a broader geographic range of use for the feature than has previously been documented, including in Canada.

Double modals in contemporary British and Irish speech

“…At country level, Scotland shows the highest overall relative frequency of double modals and England the lowest (table 9), a result in line with previous reports of the geographical distribution of the feature. The values, between 1.38 and 2.40 double modals per million words, are roughly comparable to those found for North American data, where at state/ province level, relative frequencies of double modals have been found to range from zero, for several states and provinces, to a maximum of 5.86 per million words, in the US state of Alabama (Coats 2022a).…”

“…One of the most interesting findings is would might, a form mostly absent from previous accounts of double modals in the British Isles, as the most common type. It is attested in the current data in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but also shows a broad geographic distribution in North America, where it is not concentrated in the American Southeast, the region traditionally most strongly associated with double modal use -California has the highest number of attestations (Coats 2022a). In terms of meanings, would might seems to be used to express epistemic possibility in the context of intrinsic volition or a hypothetical situation.…”

“…For additional details about the annotation scheme, see Coats (2022a), in which a similar procedure was employed.…”

“…This study attempts to provide a starting point for further research into double modal usage in the British Isles by documenting their naturalistic use in the Corpus of British Isles Spoken English (CoBISE; Coats 2022b, 2023), a collection of geolocated Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts of recordings uploaded to the channels of local government bodies in the UK and Ireland. The study assesses which double modal forms are in use in contemporary speech in council meetings in the UK and Ireland and assigns them to locations based on corpus metadata, using methods similar to those presented in Coats (2022a) for North America. The rest of the article is organized as follows: in the next section, a brief overview of some previous work on double modals in Britain and Ireland is provided, focusing primarily on the geographical distribution of the feature and the inventory of attested types.…”

A database of North American double modals and self-repairs from YouTube

“…Evidence for multiple modal usage outside the American South, for example, in New England, the Midwest, the mountain states of the West, or the Pacific coast states, is limited (for a few examples, see Antieau, 2006;Di Paolo, 1989). As far as is known, the feature has not been considered in Canadian English (see, however, Coats, 2022). Much of the existing data has been summarized in tabular form in Reed and Montgomery (2016).…”