Profiling the English Verb Phrase over Time : Modal Patterns 1 [ draft version , May 2011 ]

In recent work it has been demonstrated by various scholars that the use of modal verbs has changed in past decades (Krug 2000, Leech 2003, Smith 2003, and especially Leech et al. 2009). In earlier work Close and Aarts (2010) and Aarts, Close and Wallis (forthcoming) looked at the changing use of the modal and semimodal auxiliaries in spoken English. While the results of these investigations are extremely valuable, they tell us very little about how modal verb usage has changed within the various modal verb phrase patterns. To our knowledge no one has ever looked at the frequencies of these various patterns, let alone how they have changed over time. In section 2 of this chapter we briefly introduce the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE; Aarts and Wallis 2006) which has been used as a database for the present research. In section 3 we look at previous research on changes in the use of modal verbs as individual items (‘core modals’) in written English. We will compare our findings on spoken English with those obtained by Leech (2003) and Leech et al. (2009) for written English in section 4. In section 5 we look at relative changes, while in section 6 we will present the results of the research we have done on modal verbs occurring in various patterns, and how modal usage in these patterns developed over time. In section 7 we discuss our results. The final section is the conclusion.