Are Comparative Modals Converging or Diverging in English? Different Answers from the Perspectives of Grammaticalisation and Constructionalisation

In the last few years several papers have appeared on the synchrony and diachrony of the ‘comparative modal’ (had/'d) better, inspired by Denison and Cort (2010), which pays particular attention to the rise of ‘bare’ better, as in You better go. Van der Auwera et al. (2013) provide extensive statistical analysis of British and American usage of 'd better and its variants. Van der Auwera andDeWit (2010) investigate another comparative had/'d rather as well in the Brown family of corpora. A third comparative modal had/'d sooner is mentioned in these papers. Van linden (2015) investigates all three in the history of American English as represented in theCorpus of Historical American English (COHA), from the perspective of grammaticalisation. Likewise, Traugott (2016b) investigates all three, but in the context of the role of semantic modal maps in a constructional approach to change. Earlier works include van der Gaaf (1904, 1912). Fairly recent examples from the British National Corpus (BYU-BNC) of the three comparative modals are presented in (1a)–(1d).