Contemporary change in modal usage in spoken British English: mapping the impact of ‘genre’

Previous studies have focused on written English and only occasionally have they considered the question of whether these changes are affected by text type. The default assumption appears to be that change over time in written English is representative of changes more generally and that, if text type makes a difference, the effect of this variation is minor. However, synchronic studies in both written and spoken English have shown that text type affects the likely use of a particular core modal. In this paper we therefore go one stage further: we investigate whether different spoken text types (sometimes referred to as spoken ‘genres’) yield different results. 2