The necessity modals have to, must, need to and should: using n-grams to help identify common and distinct semantic and pragmatic aspects. 11.2: 220-243 - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Constructions and Frames Année : 2019

The necessity modals have to, must, need to and should: using n-grams to help identify common and distinct semantic and pragmatic aspects. 11.2: 220-243

Résumé

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).
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hal-02369306 , version 1 (11-04-2021)

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Bert Cappelle, Ilse Depraetere, Mégane Lesuisse. The necessity modals have to, must, need to and should: using n-grams to help identify common and distinct semantic and pragmatic aspects. 11.2: 220-243. Constructions and Frames, 2019, 11 (2), pp.220 - 243. ⟨10.1075/cf.00029.cap⟩. ⟨hal-02369306⟩
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