The necessity modalshave to,must,need to, andshould

Abstract

When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receive an appropriate interpretation from this context, thus being saturated by it. Such a context may also short-circuit illocutionary and other pragmatic aspects of interpretation. We here extract from the British National Corpus over 500 internally highly collocating and high-frequency lexical n-grams up to 5 words containing have to, must, need to, and/or should. These contexts-as-constructions go some way toward allowing us to group these four necessity modals into clusters with similar semantic and pragmatic properties and to determine which of them is semantico-pragmatically most unlike the others. It appears that have to and need to cluster most closely together thanks to their shared environments (e.g., you may have/need to…, expressing contingent, mitigated necessity), while should has the largest share of unique n-grams (e.g., rhetorical Why shouldn’t I…?, used as a defiant self-exhortation).

Hedged Performatives in Spoken American English: A Discourse-oriented Analysis

“…What Fraser (1975) does not address is the broader hedging potential of an HP as a whole in discourse, that is, does the combination of "I + modal + performative verb" function as a hedge? This is precisely the question explored by the present study, which extends the scope of the investigation beyond the interaction of the modal and the performative verb and focuses on the meaning of what is clearly a construction (Goldberg 1995(Goldberg , 2006Cappelle, Depraetere & Lesuisse 2019). 3 It follows from such a wider perspective that the term "hedged performative" is problematic as the label can easily be mistaken as indicating that the construction as a whole serves as a hedging device in context.…”