{"title":"The necessity modals have to, must, need to, and should","authors":"B. Cappelle, I. Depraetere, Mégane Lesuisse","doi":"10.1075/cf.00029.cap","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receive an appropriate\n interpretation from this context, thus being saturated by it. Such a context may also short-circuit illocutionary and other\n pragmatic aspects of interpretation. We here extract from the British National Corpus over 500 internally highly collocating and\n high-frequency lexical n-grams up to 5 words containing have to, must, need to, and/or should.\n These contexts-as-constructions go some way toward allowing us to group these four necessity modals into clusters with similar\n semantic and pragmatic properties and to determine which of them is semantico-pragmatically most unlike the others. It appears\n that have to and need to cluster most closely together thanks to their shared environments\n (e.g., you may have/need to…, expressing contingent, mitigated necessity), while should has the\n largest share of unique n-grams (e.g., rhetorical Why shouldn’t I…?, used as a defiant self-exhortation).","PeriodicalId":42321,"journal":{"name":"Constructions and Frames","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2019-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"7","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Constructions and Frames","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00029.cap","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 7
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).