Abstract
Although Indian English is the best-documented South Asian English, its diachronic development has not been described to a great extent. The present study begins to address this gap by offering a real-time perspective on the evolution of modals and semi-modals in Indian English. It sketches the changes in the frequency of modals and semi-modals in three corpora of Indian newspaper texts from 1939, 1968, and the early 2000s. Changes in the frequency of eleven modals and eleven semi-modals are found to be similar to the trends previously observed for written American and British English: semi-modals, as well as the modals can, could, and would, rise greatly in frequency. An analysis of the types of modality expressed by individual modal verbs provides in-depth insights into shifts in Indian English during the period. The study’s findings raise methodological and theoretical considerations for the diachronic study of modality in corpora in English generally: the increasing amount of direct quotation in news reportage partly accounts for a rise in modal frequency in this subgenre, which constitutes a confounding aspect seldom articulated in the study of newspaper language. Individual modal verbs exhibit different directions and speeds of change that are not reflected in the trajectory of modals as a category, demonstrating that an aggregate measure is not a suitable point of comparison between varieties to determine their degree of similarity or difference in terms of modal verb usage.
Item Type: | Journal article |
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Faculties: | Languages and Literatures > Department 3 > English Studies |
Subjects: | 400 Language > 420 English and Old English languages |
URN: | urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-94948-5 |
ISSN: | 0075-4242 |
Language: | English |
Item ID: | 94948 |
Date Deposited: | 07. Mar 2023, 13:34 |
Last Modified: | 04. Jan 2024, 11:22 |
DFG: | Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - 491502892 |