The modals of obligation and necessity in Australian English

Abstract

The semantic category of modality has attracted the interest of a large number of linguists. Despite widespread recognition that the category is realized by items from a range of grammatical classes (adjectives such as likely and necessary, adverbs such as perhaps and possibly, nouns such as ability and probability, and so on), most scholars have restricted their attention to the subset of auxiliary verbs known as the modals. 1 The complexity of the meanings expressed by the modals has presented a challenge to both semantic theory (see for example the different theoretical approaches of Boyd and Thorne 1969, Halliday 1970, Marino 1973) and descriptive grammar (for recent descriptions of modal semantics based on textual data, see Coates 1983, I-Iermeren 1978, Palmer 1979). In addition to their semantic complexity the modals display a significant amount of regional variation (as noted by Trudgill and Hannah 1982) and register variation (see for instance Coates 1983, Hermeren 1978, Collins 1988a) in Standard English. It is appropriate that the extent and nature of such variation should be explored via largescale comparative corpus study.