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Verb Structures in Twentieth-Century British English1

Nicholas Smith (University of Salford) Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster University)

1 Introduction

In this chapter we investigate recent developments among a selection of verbal constructions in standard British English (BrE), making comparisons with standard American English (AmE) where feasible, over the span of roughly three-quarters of a century. The methodology utilized for this research involves, essentially, the compilation and exploitation of comparable corpora sampled at different points in recent time, using as precisely as possible the same corpus design and sampling procedures. The approach has already yielded significant findings on ongoing change in a wide range of phenomena, such as the progressive, the modal auxiliaries, and numerous features within the noun phrase (see e.g. Hundt and Mair 1999, Smith 2003, Leech et al. 2009, to name a few). The present paper elaborates on the comparable corpus method and its findings, highlighting in particular the impact of amplifying our scope of enquiry from thirty to seventy-five years in the recent history of the language. Ironically, the starting point for the approach just referred to is a pair of corpora that were not originally designed for diachronic investigations. The main function of the Brown Corpus (Francis 1965), and the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (LOB; Johansson et al. 1978) was to provide a basis for description of contemporary usage – in the year 1961 to be precise – in AmE and BrE respectively, using empirical and systematically analytic methods. The wide range of text sampling of the Brown model ensured that each corpus was broadly representative of published English for that period and in each regional variety. Yet by offering only one chronological reference point, the corpora could not of themselves reveal which aspects of grammatical usage were in process of change.

To address this problem, in the early 1990s Christian Mair and associates at Freiburg University realized the potential of Brown and LOB as blueprints for matching diachronic corpora. They assembled the Frown and FLOB corpora representing, respectively, written AmE in 1992 and BrE in 1991 (Mair 1998). By virtue of the thirty-year ‘generation’ gap between Brown/LOB and Frown/FLOB, and their closely matching design, the four corpora offered not just a more up-to-date synchronic view of each variety of the language, but, more importantly, an unprecedented opportunity to investigate and compare real-time changes within two major varieties of written language. For the first time it was possible to:

• observe changes in progress in written English • compare rates of change from one genre to another • compare rates of change across the two regional varieties

Even as short a period as thirty years revealed significant shifts in frequency distributions of grammatical categories, e.g. an expansion in the frequency of

1 The research on which this chapter is based has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.

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different functions of the progressive (Smith 2002), declining usage and functional changes among the modal auxiliaries (Leech 2003, Smith 2003), large increases in the use of contracted forms, and a sharp decline of the BE-passive (Leech 2004a). These trends are largely echoed – in many cases initiated – in AmE (Hundt and Mair 1999, Leech et al. 2009). Although the above four corpora have proven invaluable for the analysis of late twentieth-century change in English, they tell us nothing about developments prior to the 1960s and since the early 1990s. We would like to know, for instance, how recently the above-mentioned decline of the BE-passive began, and if it has continued into the first decade of the twenty-first century. An obvious solution is to extend Mair’s approach, that is, to compile further corpora that mimic the sampling structure of the existing Brown family members. With colleagues at the Universities of Lancaster, Freiburg, Heidelberg and Salford, we have been pushing the sampling dates backwards to 1931±32 (Leech and Smith 2005), and forwards, to 2006±33 (Baker 2009). The current members of this ‘Brown family’ of corpora are presented in Table 1.

[Insert Table 1 about here]

At roughly six million words, the size of the Brown family is modest in comparison to three corpora of American English, TIME, COCA and the newly-released COHA (see Davies, this volume). Nevertheless, for British English at least – which is the focus of this paper – the quartet of BLOB-1931, LOB, FLOB and BE06 still offers one of the most detailed corpus records available of written English over the last 75 years. Moreover, our attention here is on constructions that occur sufficiently often to obtain statistically significant results, in most cases to p < .01.4 Where we compare our findings in the Brown family corpora against COHA, we generally find confirmation of our results, albeit on a larger scale.

The research potential of these corpora has been considerably enhanced by the association of each running word with a grammatical annotation, or part-of-speech (POS) tag (see Garside and Smith 1997). The tag VM, for instance, identifies each instance of a modal auxiliary verb (e.g. may, can). Constructions consisting of multiple words are not explicitly annotated, but they can be retrieved with acceptably high accuracy using search software such as CQP (Christ 1994) or CQPweb (Hardie in prep.) to match sequences of POS-tags. The CQPweb query _VAB* _VVN, for instance, represents any form of BE followed by a past participle – the core elements of the be-passive. This basic query can be elaborated to identify more complex 2 The symbol ‘±3’ used here, signifies that although 1931 was the target date, for practical reasons, we took text samples from the period stretching back and forward three years from this date. In the rest of the chapter, we will omit ‘±3’, and it will be understood that the date ‘1931’ stands for ‘1931±3’ 3 For the interpretation of ‘±3’, see footnote 2. However, for the BE06 corpus, again for practical reasons, the text samples were taken from materials posted on the web during the period 2003-8. It was found possible to sample written genres exactly as in the sampling frame of the Brown family, but since the samples were limited to texts available on the internet, inevitably the exact one-by-one text-matching procedures employed for FLOB, Frown and BLOB-1931 could not necessarily be maintained. See Baker (2009) for details. It is also obvious that the gap between FLOB and BE06 is only half the 30-year gaps between the other corpora in the Brown family. 4 In this chapter we measure the significance of diachronic changes using the log-likelihood statistic, which, according to Dunning (1993), is at least as reliable as, and sometimes more reliable than, the chi-square statistic. Both chi-square and log-likelihood share the same critical values: scores of 10.83 or above correspond to p < 0.001, 6.63 or above equates to p < 0.01, and 3.84 and above equates to p < 0.05 (with 1 degree of freedom).

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passives.5 A manual check of the resulting data indicates a precision rate well above 80 percent in retrieving passives (around 85 percent in FLOB and 83 percent in LOB). In a similar way progressives, relative clauses and other constructions can be retrieved from each member of the Brown family of corpora. In most cases the query results are hand-checked to eliminate false positives, although the retrieval can be affected by inaccuracies in the POS-tagging process (see Leech and Smith 2000 for tag error rates): some caution is therefore needed with findings from the three corpora where the tagging has not been manually post-edited: BLOB-1931, Brown and BE06. Our findings are presented in the context of an important methodological issue, namely how to determine (and compare) the frequency of verbal constructions in corpora (section 2). After illustrating the main approaches to the issue with not-contractions (section 2.2) and modality (2.2), we present more detailed case studies on the progressive (3.1) and passive (3.2) respectively. In common with other studies on language change, we also consider ‘Why?’ (or ‘How?’) questions, i.e. we suggest explanatory factors that seem to account best for the descriptive findings on a given change. For this, having access to a time span of seventy-five years, although not ideal, is certainly an improvement on the thirty-year window available to us previously. The historical processes that we have found most promising to date, for explanatory purposes, are the systemic process of grammaticalization, and social-stylistic factors, notably colloquialization, prescriptivism, and Americanization. 2. Different ways of measuring and determining frequency change 2.1. Normalized frequency: per million words (pmw)

In tracking language change, the easiest method of measurement is simply to produce normalized frequencies for each corpus being examined. In our work, we have generally used as a standard measure the number of occurrences per million words (pmw). With other historical reference corpora e.g. the Helsinki Corpus and ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), this measure would raise questions about the difficulty of determining whether the samples from different periods for different text genres are truly equivalent in size and variety. In the case of the Brown family, this difficulty is minimized, because of the employment of a strict sampling frame, down to the one-to-one mapping of equivalent 2,000-word samples.6

5 For example, passives containing optional and repeatable items, such as complex adverbials, negatives and noun phrases, between _VAB* and _VVN (see Leech et al. 2009: 148). Note that, at the time of writing, the query interface for COHA and COCA does not readily allow for iterative optional elements, and so our queries for passives, progressives and other complex constructions in these two corpora include only the core POS-tags. 6 It is possible to choose alternative linguistic units, instead of words, as the basis for normalizing measurement of text length: for example, clauses or sentences. As Sean Wallis (p.c.) has pointed out to us, “the choice of baseline depends on the research question we are exploring”. Thus, as this chapter concerns the frequency of phenomena in the verb phrase, there would be a strong argument for using the VP as the yardstick for normalized frequency. Since the Brown family of corpora is not syntactically annotated, we were not able to do this, but a very good approximation to the frequency of finite VPs (which are much more frequent than non-finite VPs) can be obtained by determining the frequency of finite verbs – including modal auxiliaries. We were able to calculate this for LOB, FLOB, Brown and Frown, and found that the density of VPs pmw varied little from one corpus to another (0.08 percent in the BrE corpora, and 1.6 percent in the AmE corpora). In other words, the findings reported in this chapter would differ only rather trivially from those which would have been presented if a VP yardstick had been used.

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To illustrate this, Figure 1 is a line-chart showing the increasing use of negative contractions (won’t, isn’t, etc.) pmw over the period 1931 - 2006 – that is, over the four corpora BLOB-1931, LOB, FLOB and BE06. From this it is clear that there has been a very marked and consistent increase in the use of negative contractions throughout the century. The overall rate in BE06 of nearly 2,928 pmw, although a long way short of the average in contemporary spoken BrE (e.g. around 12,000 pmw in the spoken part of the British National Corpus), is nevertheless a much closer approximation of speech than the 1,363 cases pmw in BLOB-1931. Here is a conspicuous example of the process researchers have called colloquialization – that is, the process whereby the written language has been tending to adopt the habits of the spoken language. [ Insert Figure 1 about here ] The chart shows the consistency of the increase in two senses – (a) overall, the increase continues steadily over the 75-year period, and (b) the increase is paralleled in the four comparably sampled genre-based subcorpora. However, not surprisingly the number of contractions is greatest in the Fiction subcorpus, and smallest in the Learned subcorpus. These two subcorpora are, as one would expect, respectively the closest and the most distant from the spoken language.7 The only exceptions to this consistent picture is a slight decrease in the use of negative contractions in the fifteen-year period between 1991 and 2006 in both Fiction and Learned – something we discuss briefly in 3.2 below. The colloquialization, however, could be a side-effect of something else. It could be that the increase of contractions is not due to any change in the use of written language itself, but in the proportion of textual material occurring in direct speech – either in quoting the speech of real people (especially in Press), or in representing the speech of fictional characters (in Fiction). It is true that the amount of speech reporting embedded in writing has grown – seemingly as part of a more general change towards a more ‘oral’ culture. But when we undertook a check on this in LOB and FLOB, we found that less than half of the increased use of contractions could be attributed to the increased use of direct speech. For example, whereas 11.6 percent of the LOB corpus represents speech, in FLOB this has increased to 12.7 percent - an increase of only 1.1 percent on the 1961 corpus, or an added 9.3 percent to the quoted speech part of the corpus.8 The increase in contractions, on the other hand, was much larger than this: 23.7 percent for verb contractions such as it’s, and 26.9 percent for negative contractions such as can’t. 2.2 The proportional (variants and variable) approach

A second way to measure frequency change, often considered preferable (see Ball 1994, Nelson et al. 2002: 260f., Smitterberg 2005: 39-53, and Aarts, Close and Wallis, this volume), is to calculate an increase (or decrease) as a change of proportion of (normally) two variants: (a) the variant under observation, and (b) the alternative variant which, linguistically, could have been used in its place. In the case

7 Less expected, perhaps, is the steep overall increase of negative contractions in Fiction. This is possibly attributable to increasing realism in speech representation within fictional dialogue. 8 These figures are based on the presence of <quote>…</quote> as delimiters of quotation, and an assumption that the vast majority of words between these tags are speech quotations.

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of negative contractions, we measure the increase in the percentage of contracted negatives, e.g. isn’t, against the total number of verb + negative particle combinations where the contraction could potentially have taken place: e.g. occurrences both of wasn’t and of was not. Figure 2 represents the increase of negative contractions using this second measure. [ Insert Figure 2 about here ] This is linguistically a better measure, since it isolates one linguistic variable, whereas the change pmw could be due to a mix of variables. In the present case, since not-

negation is a clausal feature, the rise in contractions pmw could be due not purely to an increasing preference for contractions over non-contractions, but to an increase in the frequency of negative vs positive clauses, or indeed to a decrease in the average length of clauses (and hence to an increase in the opportunities for not-negation in a million words). However, it is reassuring that the two diagrams give very much the same picture, the only noticeable difference being that for Fiction, Figure 1 shows an actual decrease 1991-2006, while Figure 2 shows a deceleration of the increase. Perhaps, then, the difference between the two measures can be exaggerated. Our further investigation of the Fiction change in 2006 revealed that the decline of negative contractions pmw was due to a fall, for reasons unknown, in the overall number of not-negations (both contracted and uncontracted).9 The proportional measurement in Figure 2 also gives some extra information – namely that since the 1990s, contractions account for c. 77 percent of the not-

negations in Fiction, and hence (since only a further c. 23 percent is conceivable) the rise in contractions in Fiction could be not far from reaching a saturation point.10 Further, the figure of 77 percent is an underestimate, as there are limits to the extent to which such percentages can accurately reflect the property of ‘contractability’. There are some not-negations which cannot be contracted – for example, the not in examples (1)-(6) cannot be contracted to –n’t in standard present-day BrE or AmE, at least not without some further change(s): (1) I am not afraid of Rossi. (LOB N23) [Cf: * I amn’t afraid....] (2) It’s not mine. (LOB R02) You’re not a fool. (LOB P04) (3) Is this not where the King’s great-grandfather was murdered? (FLOB P09) (4) The challengers have clearly not made much of an impression. (FLOB A07) (5) I may not be able to travel with you. (LOB P13) (6) She lost not a second... (Brown K12) Equally, there are tokens of -n’t, e.g. in questions with inversion, that cannot be expanded into an uncontracted form, at least not without difficulty or without some further change(s): (7) He said two hundred pounds, didn’t he? (Frown L18) [Cf: *did not he?]

9 Compare results of the analysis of change in the use of contractions of Varela Pérez (this volume), who focuses on the variation between verb contraction and negative contraction in such alternants as It’s not fair and It isn’t fair. 10 For comparison, the corresponding figure for not-contractions in the spoken part of the BNC is 80.3 percent. In the Fiction part of COHA, in the period 2000-9, it is 73.3 percent.

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Without going into detail into the reasons why the alternation -n’t ~ not does not apply to all cases, it will be clear that ‘contractability’ is not an easy property to define, let alone to quantify, even though it might be thought one of the simplest grammatical variables to handle. Enough has been said, then, to suggest why the exact determination of variants of the same linguistic variable is not unproblematic, and any automatic procedure to identify variants (particularly in an unparsed corpus) is likely to be inexact. In analysing the data for Figure 2, we used a relatively simple extraction algorithm: searching for Verb + n’t to identify contractions and Verb + not (where Verb represents a finite form of one of the primary verbs BE, HAVE, and DO, or one of the modal auxiliaries) to identify uncontracted forms. This was a less than optimal method of identifying cases of contractable not: by no means 100 percent accurate, but nevertheless accurate enough to show the general trend of significant increase. Illustrating a more complex case of alternation, Aarts et al. (this volume: 000) discuss how to determine the set of ‘progressivisable’ VPs as a means of identifying the ‘true alternants’: that is, the cases where there is a real linguistic choice to be made between progressive and non-progressive. As Aarts et al. point out, “Identifying a set of true alternants is often easier said than done”, acknowledging that “the process of identifying variants is, in part, subjective, and hence an approximation” (p.000). Other chapters in this book further illustrate some of the difficulties in deciding whether a VP is progressivisable. Thus Levin (this volume: Figure 1, p.000) shows how the progressive with BE + Adjective constructions has increased over fourfold in the TIME corpus in the period 1920s-2000s, from 1.1 pmw to 4.8 pmw. However, one wonders in which of the examples of this construction the non-progressive can be truly said to alternate with the progressive. In general, BE being

Adjective constructions appear to be limited to cases where the Adjective denotes a form of abstract behaviour (normally human behaviour) as in You’re being impatient, but examples such as Now we’re being psychoanalytic (from COHA, 1938) or I am

being stale (COHA, 1960) show how the set of behavioural adjectives would have to be stretched almost to breaking point to accommodate nonce usages. Another contributor to this volume, Kaltenböck (Figure 6, p.000) illustrates how the progressive has been gradually establishing itself since the 1950s in comment clauses such as I am guessing, in a context and with verbs normally considered inimical to the progressive. In both these cases, the question worth asking is: At what stage in the historical emergence of ‘new progressives’, initially occurring very rarely, does the customary non-progressive form become progressivisable? Given the difficulty of determining ‘true alternants’ in the proportional method, we find it convenient, as well as justifiable, to treat normalized frequency pmw as a primary datum in our further case studies in this chapter, while using the proportional method in parallel where feasible. This will be illustrated in our dealings with the passive voice and progressive construction in 3.1-2. The pmw method has the advantage that it is in keeping with the word-counting principle (500 texts of 2,000 words each) which underlies the comparability of corpora in the Brown family. 2.3 The ecological approach

It is a commonplace in linguistics that there is no such thing as free variation. The two or more variants of the same variable are almost inevitably subject to differing constraints, which may (for instance) be lexical or grammatical, stylistic or sociolinguistic (see Lavandera 1978). When we turn from binary choices in grammar

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to the multiple choices that often occur within a single semantic field, the whole notion of linguistic variables is likely to become more problematic as the number of alternatives increases. In this situation, one can adopt a more loosely-defined approach we call ecological.11 [Insert Figure 3 about here] The semantic field of ‘obligation/necessity’ is impressionistically represented in Figure 3 as three concentric zones – the core modals, the emergent (or semi-) modals, and lexical expressions of modality.12 In a large historical perspective, the inner two zones of core and emergent modals are seen as two successive stages of grammaticalization (Hopper and Traugott 2003), but synchronically as two coexisting resources for expressing modality – a phenomenon known as layering (Hopper 1991: 22). (The bracketed modals are less central here, as they have other meanings apart from obligation/necessity.) At the heart of Figure 3, the core modal auxiliaries such as must, now generally on the wane (see e.g. Myhill 1995, Smith 2003), are traditionally considered central to this area. Nevertheless, core modals are still the most common means for expressing modality,13 and therefore take a central or ‘core’ position in our diagram. As we move from the grammatical centre towards the lexical periphery of the diagram, we encounter the emergent modals such as HAVE to which have been widely considered canonical examples of grammaticalization.

14 These have been generally on the rise, and in certain areas (particularly in speech) are rivalling the core modals. In the outer part of Figure 3, the lexical zone, we give a selection of the lexical items – verbs, adjectives, nouns and adverbs – which, with their grammatical valency patterns, are capable of expressing obligation/necessity: for example, (BE)

required, (BE) essential, (BE) obligatory, compulsion, necessarily. In frequency terms, these tend to be more marginal than the core and emergent modals, and for lack of space we must ignore them here – which does not mean that they are not worth careful study (see Perkins 1983). This picture, of course, is lacking in detail, and all we can attempt here is a sketch of a rather complex situation. Although the three categories are broadly

11The term ‘ecological’ here envisages competing word forms metaphorically as part of an ‘ecosystem’, and has no connection with what has become known as linguistic ecology (Haugen 1972) or ecolinguistics (Mühlhäusler and Fill 2000). For recent studies which might be called ecological in our sense, see Smith (2003) on the modals of obligation/necessity, and Nesselhauf (2010) on future constructions. See also Close and Aarts (2010) on the changing frequencies of MUST, HAVE to and HAVE

got to in spoken BrE. 12 The three categories ‘core’, ‘emergent’ and ‘lexical’ are not discrete, but rather positions on a cline. Note that need(n’t) is being used as a convenient mnemonic for NEED constructed as a non-assertive core modal. 13 In the Brown family data for BrE, the core modals were over 8 times as frequent as the emergent modals in 1931, declining to 5.2 times as frequent in 2006. The very different picture in spoken English is discussed in Section 2.3.2 below. 14 The term ‘emergent modals’ is from Krug’s term ‘emerging modals’ (2000), though the list of items included is slightly different from that of Krug, and so a slight alteration in the name is justifiable. In particular, NEED (to) and ought to are marginally classified by Krug as emerging modals, while we regard the auxiliaries need(n’t) and ought to as core modals, and NEED to as an emergent modal. We have elsewhere (e.g. Leech and Smith 2009) used the term semi-modal to cover more or less the same

set of modal expressions, but here we exclude BE to from emergent modals, and place it with the core modals, as proposed by Declerk (2010). For this reason the frequency figures for core modals and emergent modals are somewhat different from those given for modals and semi-modals in previous publications such as Leech et al. (2009).

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distinct, there are borderline cases, and each verb (or adjective, noun, etc.) has its own story: some core modals are declining very significantly, others slowly. Emergent modals also show very different degrees of frequency and of frequency change. Our sketch of the main trends will adduce evidence from the Brown family of corpora of written BrE and AmE, while not ignoring evidence from other sources (particularly corpora of spoken English). These different expressions of modality have their minor differences of meaning, their different grammatical constraints, and their different genre and regional distributions. The ecological metaphor which suggests itself for conceptualizing the obligation/necessity field is that of an uncultivated plot of land as a plant habitat. Over the years plant distributions change. Certain plants flourish or get a foothold, others wane or die out; some find a niche in the shade, others in the sunshine. Some find a home in marshy terrain, others in dry stony terrain – and so on. If an ecological survey takes place every 30 years, this is somewhat analogous to the sampling of the language carried out in our Brown family corpora. For us, certain processes such as grammaticalization, colloquialization and democratization

15 will provide tentative hypotheses to account for observed change, but there is a need to account for a number of interacting syntactic, semantic and genre factors. We would probably not be justified in assuming that the meaning potential for modality remains stable over the historical period we are studying.16 One hypothesis is that a social change we can call ‘democratization’ is partly responsible for the declining popularity of must (because of its imperious overtones, as in That woman

must go! [FLOB P20]) and the increased popularity of the less authoritarian emergent modals HAVE to and NEED to. If this is correct, then the shape of the semantic field of ‘obligation/necessity’ might have been changing somewhat, as the need to express strong deontic modality has lessened. More will be said on this speculative theme later: now we focus on the core modals (2.3.1), the emergent modals (2.3.2) and some conclusions (2.3.3) on the interrelationship of these two categories. 2.3.1 Core modals

The class of core modals as a whole declined 10 percent in both BrE and AmE during the period 1961-91 (Leech et al. 2009: 71-78, 283), and has since continued its decline. It appears (see Table 2 – and this is confirmed by other studies)17 that this rather general decline of modals has set in relatively recently, from around the middle of the twentieth century (Leech and Smith 2009: 187).18

15 On these three processes, see Leech et al. (2009: 237-249, 259-263). Colloquialization is the process whereby, over time, features characteristic of spoken language are progressively adopted by the written language. Democratization is the process described by Fairclough (1992: 98) as the ‘reduction of overt markers of power and asymmetry’. 16 See Cort and Denison (2005) on the instability of modality in a diachronic perspective. 17 Again COHA, as well as COCA, provides corroboration of this finding, with a decline of modals throughout the twentieth century in AmE, with a particularly sharp decline, latterly, of must and need(n’t) – see Leech (forthcoming). 18 It is also clear, however, that the overall pattern is not followed in all genres. Thus, in Biber et al.’s (1998: 208) ARCHER study, should shows a general increase in News writing, but a decrease in fiction writing. A more recent study (Millar 2009) of the TIME corpus indicates an overall increase in the (core) modals in Time Magazine between 1923 and 2007, as contrasted with the decline in the more broadly sampled Brown family of corpora discussed here. See Leech (forthcoming) for discussion of Millar’s findings relative to COHA, COCA and the Brown family.

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[Insert Table 2 about here] If we focus solely on the core modals of strong obligation/necessity in 1961-91, however, the decline has been as great as 31 percent for must and 32 percent for need(n’t) with even bigger falls for must in spoken BrE and written AmE (Smith 2003: 248-9). The decreasing usage of the relevant core modals (in all uses) over the longer period 1931-2006 is shown in Figure 4. [ Insert Figure 4 about here ] The non-assertive verb need(n’t) is apparently in terminal decline, having virtually disappeared from conversational AmE (Leech et al. 2009: 100). Of other core modals touching on this semantic field, BE to and should are less central, as the former is a borderline modal of futurity and the latter is a modal of weak rather than strong modality. The following example illustrates how BE to often combines futurity with a deontic force: (8) That autumn Churchill was told that he was to be sent to boarding school.

(FLOB G04) BE to is classed as a core modal auxiliary by Declerk (2010: 236), and we have decided to treat it as such here, although it has a mixture of core and emergent modal characteristics: (a) Like core modals, it has no non-finite forms, and cannot combine with other core modals; (b) like emergent modals, however, it has a clear present/preterite distinction, varies with number and person (am to, is to, are to, was

to, were to), and has the infinitive marker to. According to Nesselhauf (2006), BE to decreased markedly over the period 1700-1900,19 and that trend has continued through at least most of the twentieth century. Its declining frequency in both AmE and BrE allows BE to to fit more readily into the core modal category. Should (unlike must, a modal of weak obligation/necessity) merits a brief discussion because its decline has been shallower than that of must and need(n’t) (c. 12 percent in both AmE and BrE in 1961-1991 in the Brown family, compared with 31 percent in the case of must and 32 percent in the case of need(n’t)), and it may have become a preferred alternative to must because its weaker force makes it less face-threatening in deontic use. Some evidence in favour of this is the fact that the deontic use of should remained stable (in AmE) or even increased (in BrE) in 1961-91, whereas its other uses, including the epistemic, declined steeply (Leech et al.

2009: 284). Should, like its declining synonym ought to, is now predominantly a deontic modal, as in: (9) The Liberal Democrats last night repeated their view that the Home Secretary

should quit. (FLOB A28) (10) But we ought not overlook the generally youthful character of Bishop’s

experiments with surrealism. (Frown G33)

19 Part of the reason for this may lie in increasing grammatical restrictions on the use of BE to. It formerly occurred in non-finite forms, as the following quotation from Jane Austen’s Persuasion

illustrates: […] for this young lady, this same Miss Musgrove, instead of being to marry Frederick, is to

marry James Benwick. (Chapter 18)

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Ought to, as another modal of weak obligation/necessity, is becoming rare in the written language (56 pmw in the BNC), although it survives more robustly in speech (123 pmw in the spoken BNC). The to following ought gives it the appearance of an emergent modal, although in every other respect it resembles core modals, and in AmE, the to is often lost after a negative, as example (10) shows. Our remaining core modal, shall, is mainly categorized as an obligation/necessity modal because of its stipulative use in legal or quasi-legal texts: (11) The Secretary of the Interior shall submit a report of his findings … (Brown

H09)

Shall has been in overall decline through the twentieth century – a continuation of a longer term trend (see Gotti 2003, Nesselhauf 2010), and is now little more than a remnant of its former self.20 Like most other modals, its decline is more marked in AmE. One possible reason for decline of the core modals is their lack of morphological and functional variability – what we might call paradigmatic atrophy. Core modals in general lack non-finite forms, and have often lost their present/preterite alternation. The modals must, need(n’t), ought to have no preterite at all (although they can be used in indirect speech in reference to past time), and the case for regarding shall and should as present/preterite alternants has become untenable. Another sign of decline might be described as distributional

fragmentation. Shall, apart from being restricted in person (first person pronouns being by far the most common subjects of shall) is also restricted in genre: the use of shall with third person subjects is mostly restricted to rhetorical, archaic, and (quasi-) legal usage (cf. Williams, this volume), and its use is therefore very unevenly spread across the corpora. 2.3.2 Emergent modals of obligation/necessity

As an explanation for the decreasing use of core modals of obligation/necessity, there is much plausibility in the argument that the ‘new’ generation of emergent modals, especially HAVE to, has been increasingly encroaching on the territory of the core modals.21 This can be argued on three grounds. Firstly, the emergent modals (e.g. HAVE to, BE going to, HAVE got to and had

better) are classic cases of grammaticalization, of which two major signs are (a) phonetic reduction and coalescence (note the omission of be and have as auxiliaries, and spellings gonna, gotta and better) and (b) increasing frequency of use. The increasing use of emergent modals of obligation/necessity is evident through the Brown family corpora, as Table 2 shows for the four BrE Brown corpora. But this is not the whole story – as we will show shortly. Secondly, the emergent modals in general have greater paradigmatic availability. HAVE to and NEED to for example, have past tense and non-finite forms, and can therefore be used in positions not available to must and need(n’t):

20 Williams (this volume: 000) reports on the drastically declining use of shall in legislative texts. See also Aarts et al. (this volume: 000), for detailed discussion of the decline of shall (vis-a-vis will) in spoken BrE, and Tagliamonte (this volume: 000) for the virtual disappearance of shall from her spoken Canadian English data. 21 ‘New’ is a relative term. Biber et al. (1999: 487) cite the OED as first attesting NEED to before 1400, (HAVE) got to after 1800, and other emergent modals at various intermediate dates.

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(12) They may have to call up the reinforcement of the Common Market (LOB

B03) (13) ‘We had to leave him behind and he was picked up.’ (LOB L21) (14) Finally, I basked in the luxury of not needing to travel far for a race.

(FLOB E17) These are examples where the core modals could not be substituted. However, Smith (2003: 254-255) reaches the conclusion that the increasing use of HAVE to in FLOB compared with LOB in contexts where must could not occur did not account for all of the increase of HAVE to between 1961 and 1991. It could be a partial, but not a total explanation. Thirdly, there is the meaning-based argument that deontic must – where the authoritor (or deontic source) is typically the utterer or the originator of the message – has been losing out to HAVE to and NEED to, because these emergent modals do not have the same face-threatening effect, as would be clear if must were substituted for has to and need to in (16) and (17): (15) … there was an Order, and it said, simply, that she must go…. (FLOB J61) (16) The poor ratepayer has to pay, and it is therefore right that he should ask, is it

worth it ? (LOB B25) (17) But youngsters also need to be taught to be self-sufficient. (BE06 A24) In (16) has to is less threatening because it implies that the deontic source is some external force – in this case, presumably, the local government. In (17) need to is again less face-threatening because the deontic source is inherent in the subject referents (the ‘youngsters’ themselves), who are therefore understood to be the beneficiaries of the proposed action. This dispreference for must has been associated with the democratization of modern English-speaking societies (see Fairclough 1992: 203, Leech et al. 2009: 259-263). However, this is again a partial explanation, as (at least in AmE) the decline affects not only deontic but epistemic uses of must (Leech et al. 2009: 88).22 At most, this can help to explain why must has declined more severely than other core modals. Returning to the increase in frequency of emergent modals, there is one resounding counterargument to the hypothesis that the fall in core modal frequency is due to the rise in emergent modals: this is that even in 2006 the core modals are still more than 5 times as numerous as the emergent modals in the Brown family corpora. Hence there is a sizeable gap (of 2,117 pmw) between the number of core modals lost and the number of emergent modals gained in the 75-year period 1931-2006. Some of the emergent modals, if we include (HAVE) got to, BE supposed to and (had) better, are infrequent in the Brown family, and even where they increase, their contribution to the overall increase is trivial. However, the picture is totally different when we turn to spoken English (although some findings have to be seen as provisional). Our comparison of matching spoken BrE samples from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-day Spoken English

(DCPSE) – cf. Aarts et al. this volume – taken from the 1960s and the 1990s show an

22 The epistemic use of HAVE to remains rare in both AmE and BrE (Leech et al. 2009: 109), and its incidence is not sufficient to explain the decline of epistemic must, in spite of its familiarity in such examples as You have to be joking. Epistemic (HAVE) got to, as in You gotta be kidding, appears to be more frequent in AmE.

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increase of emergent modals of 36.8 percent (Leech et al. 2009: 287), far more than the increase in the Brown family 1961-1991.23 More striking evidence, though lacking an earlier comparator, comes from the conversational subcorpus of the BNC (demographically sampled in the early 1990s), and a corresponding conversational corpus of AmE, the Longman Spoken American Corpus (LSAC). In the British conversational corpus, the emergent modals of obligation/necessity outnumber the core modals of obligation/necessity by 1.5 to 1.24 In the American conversational corpus, the result is all the more remarkable, as emergent modals outnumber the core modals by 2.75 to 1. The most astonishing observation here is that must, in conversational AmE, is less frequent than all three emergent modals of strong obligation/necessity, viz. HAVE to, NEED to and (HAVE) got to (or gotta). (18) You have to let it dry through for about twenty minutes. (LSAC 112702) (19) Well, they still need a receptionist. They need to find one. (LSAC 147201) (20) I want an essay on this and it’s gotta be 5000 words. (LSAC 111003) Put simply, it seems that by the 1990s, the emergent modals in conversational English have taken over the central position of the core modals in the field of obligation/necessity. Figure 3, although still appropriate for written English, does not apply to spoken conversation at the end of the twentieth century. 2.3.3 Conclusions on modals of obligation/necessity

Reviewing the whole field of obligation/necessity as expressed by modal verbs, a number of interacting factors appear to have played a role in change. If we assume that grammaticalization is primarily a process of the spoken language, then, although there is limited direct corpus evidence, it seems likely that the growth in the use of emergent modals in speech has proceeded through at least most of the twentieth century, and that this has had an indirect effect on the written language through colloquialization. However, this effect has taken place subject to a time lag, and there has been an entrenched resistance in written language, which can erect a kind of ‘prestige barrier’ against colloquialisms, especially against emergent modals such as (HAVE) got to and (had) better, which have remained rare in the written corpora, and have shown little if any increase. The argument for the semantic – or rather, pragmatic – impact of the democratization process on the particularly steep decline of must and the steep rise of NEED to remains speculative. However, NEED to is only tentatively regarded as an emergent modal (Krug 2000: 236-239), and if the grammaticalization of NEED to is not accepted, there is all the more reason to seek alternative explanations, such as ‘democratization’, for its meteoric rise. Mention should be made of some extra factors we have not had space to deal with. First, it appears that the grammaticalization process takes place over different phases for different modals. In the 1961-1991 period, HAVE to was the emergent modal of obligation/necessity par excellence, but it seems to have reached a peak towards the end of the twentieth century, when it has been levelling off, with even a

23 A particularly relevant study here is Close and Aarts (2010), analyzing the interrelations between frequency changes of must, HAVE to and (HAVE) got to in spoken BrE, using the entire DCPSE. One of Close and Aarts’ findings is a decline of (HAVE) got to across DCPSE, which may partly explain the modest frequency of the pattern in the written texts of the Brown family. 24 For this purpose, the core modals were should, ought, must, shall, need(n’t) and BE to, and the emergent modals were HAVE to, NEED to, (HAVE) got to, BE suppose(d) to and (had) better.

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slight decline in frequency (Krug 2000: 84; Smith 2003: 250). The most recent datum that we have is that the frequency of HAVE to declined from 820 pmw in FLOB to 740 pmw in BE06, while during the same period, the frequency of HAVE to rose even more steeply than before, from 193 to 312, so this newly emergent modal appears to be still vigorously on the increase, which could possibly account for a recent fall in the frequency of HAVE to. Second, the genre factor deserves more attention. We have already noted very marked differences between frequencies in spoken and written corpora, but it is also revealing to examine the relative frequency of modals in the different subcorpora of the Brown family. [Insert Figure 5 about here] Figure 5 shows, as an example, the differences in the frequency climb of HAVE to (pmw) in BrE 1931-1991, for each subcorpus of BLOB-1931, LOB and FLOB, as well for each corpus as a whole. The highest climb is that of Fiction, which, not surprisingly, usually shows a frequency pattern closest to the spoken language. The lowest climb, again not surprisingly, is that of the Learned subcorpus, usually the most distant from the spoken language. This pattern supports the assumption that grammaticalization brings about a frequency increase in speech which is then progressively and differentially transferred, through colloquialization, to the written language. A further factor, of course, is regional variation, which in our study has been restricted to standard written varieties of AmE and BrE. The differences that have been noted are considerable, and point to the conclusion that while AmE and BrE have been travelling the same track, spoken AmE is more advanced in switching to emergent modals. Nevertheless, there are signs that although BrE is the more conservative variety in general, written AmE, in its reluctance to embrace emergent modals, particularly HAVE to, has its own brand of conservatism, possibly associated with a stronger culture of prescriptivism. By focusing on the Brown family, we have inevitably ignored more specific regional varieties which might show a very different picture: e.g. Scots and Tyneside English have abandoned shall more thoroughly than the general British corpora show (Brown and Millar 1980: 85; Trousdale 2003: 381), and are in some respects closer to AmE. This section has touched on some of the major findings of corpus research on recent modals, but the complexity of the picture invites further research on a number of fronts, to reveal the ‘ecology’ of ‘obligation/necessity’ in greater depth and detail. 3.1 The Progressive

The progressive is one construction we might expect to have significantly expanded in use in recent times. Previous research into the text frequency of the construction has consistently charted increases across the Modern period (Mossé 1938, Dennis 1940, Strang 1982, Elsness 1994, Smitterberg 2005, Kranich 2008). What is less clear is whether there has merely been a general expansion or consolidation of existing

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types (as argued, for example, by Strang 1982), or whether specific uses have been gaining ground more significantly than others.25 In Leech et al. (2009: 118-44), we discuss an increase in the overall frequency of the progressive in late twentieth-century English (based on LOB, FLOB, Brown and Frown). It seems that this expansion is more concentrated in particular parts of the paradigm than others, notably:

(a) in both BrE and AmE, an increase in the present progressive (active)26 (b) in BrE only, an increase in the progressive passive, again in the present tense (c) in BrE only, an increase in progressives in combination with modal auxiliaries

(modal + progressive) The findings are statistically significant, whether the calculation is done per million words or in comparison to non-progressive equivalents (Leech et al. 2009: 289).27 Here, we reconsider these developments in the light of findings from BLOB-1931 and BE06. 3.1.1 The progressive passive

Compared to other parts of the paradigm, the progressive (be-) passive is of very recent vintage, dating back most probably to the second half of the eighteenth century (see Denison 1998: 152f.). Recent examples include: (21) Some cameras originally installed to fight crime are now being used to monitor

bus lanes [BE06 A38] (22) The importance of wind energy … is being actively encouraged in Germany,

the Netherlands and Denmark, where it now generates 2 per cent of electricity. [FLOB B09]

Three recent studies, Hundt (2004), Smith and Rayson (2007), and Leech et

al. (2009) note an increase of the progressive passive in BrE in the late twentieth century, and by contrast a decline in AmE.28 Within BrE, the increases are borne mainly by the present progressive passive (p < 0.001), while the past tense equivalent remains stable. More complex patterns (e.g. they have been being built, they will be

being built) are possible, but remain extremely rare. However, the addition of the BLOB-1931 and BE06 corpora muddies the

waters somewhat. A non-significant decline in the progressive passive is found between BLOB-1931 and LOB (1961) (233 vs. 206 pmw). A bigger decline (19.8 percent, with p between .05 and .01) is found between FLOB (1991) and BE06, such that no overall growth occurs from 1931 to 2006; see Figure 6. [Insert Figure 6 about here]

25 Strang’s study, although it included the twentieth century, was confined to past progressives in fiction. 26 A puzzling decline of the past progressive (active) in BrE remains to be explained. In AmE the past progressive is stable during this period, according to Brown and Frown, as well as COHA. 27 Our analysis omits clipped forms of the progressive (e.g. Leaving early?), as well as coordinated cases that are not realized as full VPs (e.g. the second -ing in They were singing and dancing). 28 COHA provides further evidence for AmE: after successive decades of growth, the progressive passive starts to decline in the mid-twentieth century, and this accelerates after the 1970s.

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Even so, the progressive passive in BrE has been more resilient than most of its rivals. Firstly, the non-progressive passive, in contrast, has plummeted (see further, 3.2.1 below). Second, an erstwhile competitor, the passival progressive, illustrated by an example from 1901, is either absent or extremely rare in the 1931-2006 corpora.29

(23) “[We] found that the old town had been destroyed by the orders of the Emir,

and that a new one was building upon its southern confines” (BLOB-1901 N05)

However, there are two informal/colloquial alternatives to the progressive be-passive that, collectively, appear to have an increasing impact towards the end of the twentieth century: i) the get-passive (progressive and non-progressive) – see 3.2.2, and ii) the active progressive with a generalized subject such as they or you, as in (24), which in present tense increases overall from 24 to 51 instances between LOB and FLOB: (24) If you are cooking a roast, place the meat on a rack over the potatoes [FLOB

E20] The present progressive passive in present-day BrE differs from these rivals in its stylistic characteristics. Most of its occurrences are in genres with an informational orientation, particularly those pertaining to current affairs, including Press reportage and editorials (see (21) and (22) above), and trade or hobby magazines.30 This would seem to be a natural expansion of the foothold it attained in newspaper reportage towards the end of the nineteenth century (Hundt 2004). 3.1.2 The progressive in combination with modal auxiliaries

More clearly than with the passive, the progressive in construction with a modal auxiliary (e.g. It may be getting colder, they will be going soon) appears to be gaining ground in BrE. Across two measures – frequency pmw and frequency relative to the non-progressive modal – we observe an expansion of this pattern. Figure 7, which uses the pmw method of calculation, shows modal + progressive constructions as a group gaining in most genres of BrE from 1931 to 2006. [Insert Figure 7 about here] As we saw in 2.3.1, most of the core modals have undergone a dramatic decline, in contrast to the pattern shown here for modal + progressive. As with the progressive passive, we notice a difference between BrE and AmE: occurrences of modal + progressive are at almost the same level in Brown as in Frown.

The lion’s share of growth in modal + progressive in BrE is accounted for by the pattern will + be -ing. Tellingly, despite their aspectual marking, most cases of

29 The decline of the passival progressive vs. the progressive passive in nineteenth-century English is charted in Hundt (2004: 104) and Smitterberg (2005: 128). 30 A similar tendency can be seen in the BNC and in the British component of the International Corpus

of English (ICE-GB), where the highest-ranking genres include – besides news reportage and editorials – broadcast news, documentaries and discussions, press editorials, parliamentary debates and business letters.

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will + be -ing nowadays do not appear to convey the notion of ‘event in progress’, cf. (25) and (26): (25) But Ralph says he is not superstitious about things like that and will be

chairing the meeting as usual. [FLOB B22] (26) Debbie will be starting an AVCE course in September. [BE06 F01] Instead of aspect, attention seems to be paid here to an implication of the event happening naturally or according to expectation, together with absence of volition or intention on the part of the subject (cf. Leech 2004b). As a historical development, Celle and Smith (2010) suggest that this reflects the English progressive grammaticalizing into a more subjective – and less strictly aspectual – type of meaning, along the lines of meaning subjectification proposed for other constructions by Elizabeth Traugott (Traugott 1995, Traugott and Dasher 2002).

Finally, from the ecological perspective, as one construction among several expressing future time, will + be -ing is the only form that enjoys a significant proportional increase in written BrE between 1961 and 1991 (see Celle and Smith 2010: 244-246).31 The frequencies of will + be -ing in Brown and Frown (40 and 43 instances respectively) and LOB and FLOB (63, 89 cases) suggest this construction has been unaffected by Americanization. Meanwhile the BE going to future, a far more celebrated example of grammaticalization in the Modern period, shows little sign of change in BrE – that is, until the interval 1991 to 2006, when it gains significant momentum, rising from 244 to 294 occurrences. A recent example is:

(27) Clear the area where you’re going to put the compost bin … (BE06 E14)

This is still some way short of the frequency and expansion in AmE in the

early 1990s (329 occurrences in Frown, up from 216 in Brown). If there is American influence here, BrE appears to succumb to it comparatively late.32

3.1.3 Present progressive active

Results for the present progressive in BrE (Figure 8) indicate that it is relatively stable until 1961, and gains momentum afterwards. In all genres except Learned writing an increase occurs in 1991 and again in 2006, with Press writing being the most prolific. An initial hypothesis might be that the upward trend reflects a general colloquializing tendency. The form conveys ‘situational immediacy’ (Smitterberg 2005: 96), and is therefore abundant in registers that are informal and/or oral in character. It is far more likely to appear in speech quotations and in contracted form than its passive equivalent (Leech et al. 2009: 124-127). [Insert Figure 8 about here]

To investigate the growth of present progressives, we focus on two types of

use that have been suggested as significant in the recent historical expansion of the

31 There is a non-significant decline of will be –ing between FLOB and BE06 (from 89 to 79 instances). 32 This is supported in COHA, where will + be -ing undergoes only modest growth between the 1940s (32 pmw) and 2000s (40 pmw). BE going to, meanwhile, is more than ten times as frequent in this data as will + be -ing, although its growth levels off between the 1990s and 2000s.

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construction. For reasons of space, this more detailed analysis is limited to the period 1961 to 1991 in BrE, represented by LOB and FLOB, respectively. I. Use with stative verbs One prominent factor suggested in previous accounts is a growing acceptability of the progressive with stative verbs: see e.g. Potter (1975: 118-122), Aitchison (1991: 100). Smitterberg (2005: 174) reports that across his nineteenth-century corpus of BrE, stative verbs did indeed increase steadily.

We follow Leech (2004b) and Huddleston and Pullum (2002) in dividing verbs lending themselves to stative interpretation into the following classes: (a) perception and sensation (e.g. SEE, HEAR, SMELL, HURT, TASTE), cf. (27), (b) cognition, emotion, attitude (e.g. THINK, FEEL, FORGET, LONG, REMEMBER), cf. (28), (c) having and being (e.g. BE, HAVE, HAVE TO, COST, REQUIRE), cf. (29) and (3), and (d) stance (e.g. SIT, STAND, LIE, LIVE, FACE), cf. (31):33 (27) …in many countries Baptists are seeing significant growth [FLOB D13] (28) “I’m thinking for the moment in plain, economic terms” [LOB K03] (29) …experiments at the Common Cold Research Unit at Salisbury are having to

be postponed because of a shortage of volunteers [LOB B18] (30) “You’re not being fair.” [FLOB N11] (31) Not only are we living in a rapidly changing world… [FLOB D15] Although we find a slight overall increase in the number of tokens from these classes, none of them is to a statistically significant level. The impact they have had on the present progressive overall is thus small, lending little support to the (largely intuitive) claims made by scholars such as Potter (1975) and Aitchison (1991).34 Moreover we find extremely few instances of verbs at the higher end of the stative-dynamic scale, such as BELIEVE and LOVE. Certainly examples such as the McDonalds I’m loving it! and the following (spoken) case of KNOW are possible, and perhaps increasingly so, but as yet their penetration into more formal, expository varieties of standard English is extremely limited. (32) Some of the older people like me… we’re not so familiar with this new

technology ... but the kids of today know how to use it, and increasingly all the rest of us are knowing how to use it as well.” (Tony Blair, 7/12/1999)

II. Special uses The progressive in English has a number of ‘special’ uses, such as the futurate use, i.e. referring to future time, cf. (33); and expressive or attitudinal functions, i.e. incorporating a high degree of subjective expression of the speaker/writer’s attitude, or evaluation of the situation. The latter include the expressive use with always (e.g. 34) and the so-called interpretive use (35): (33) She’s staying over in London next Wednesday night (FLOB N04)

33 The term ‘stative verb’ is largely a label of convenience, as many of the verbs in these categories allow both stative and dynamic interpretations. 34 In AmE the overall increase is slightly higher. Levin (this volume) comes to similar conclusions, based on his study of AmE in the TIME corpus, spanning 1923–2006.

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(34) People are always waiting outside the theatre with some pitiable story (FLOB P22)

(35) But when a Russian talks of the horrors of war, he is talking a different language from a nuclear disarmer. (LOB A26)

Such examples can be seen as part of the grammaticalization of the progressive, in that the scope of meaning has extended beyond the basic aspectual notion of a situation in progress. Over the last two centuries, however, the futurate use seems to have enjoyed at best a shallow increase in frequency (compare Smitterberg 2005: 175 and Nesselhauf 2007). Smitterberg (2005: 175) finds no gain in the always-type use, but an increase of the interpretive use from 3 percent to 5 percent of all progressives. Our own investigations (Leech et al. 2009: 131-6) similarly suggest that the latter is a more promising avenue of exploration.

Scholars who have discussed the interpretive use argue that it involves a clause in the progressive interpreting, or uncovering the deeper significance of, a situation with which the addressee is assumed to be familiar, either because it is mentioned explicitly, cf. (35) above, or is inferable from the context, cf. (36).35 (36) “Are you regretting anything?” Nigel said (LOB P13) As in the case of will + be –ing, the historical emergence of the interpretive use is consistent with Traugott’s (1995) theory of subjectification: it conveys the speaker’s subjective evaluation of a situation, and is less concerned with its temporal contour. We coded interpretive instances using a cluster of features suggested by König (1980, 1995) and Ljung (1980). For convenience, we follow Ljung (1980) in calling the object of interpretation ‘part A’ (whether it is mentioned or simply understood), and the interpreting part (in the progressive) ‘part B’:

(a) Part B redescribes Part A, giving it a deeper significance, e.g. by assigning illocutionary force;

(b) A and B are construed as simultaneous; (c) the subjects in parts A and B are coreferential; (d) A and B appear in a syntactic frame, e.g. In saying/doing A, X was (really)

saying/doing B (König 1980); (e) the subjects of A and B are agentive: Ljung (1980) argues that it is generally

only animate (human) behaviour that people are interested in, and wish to interpret;

(f) B contains a speech-act (illocutionary) verb: this may help to identify the utterance as a metalinguistic comment on another utterance.

Pace König (1980) and Kearns (2003), some of these features, notably the last four, are better seen as prototypical than as necessary and sufficient. Treating (c), for instance, as essential would rule out (37), although it clearly presents the further-reaching interpretation of a given situation. (37) “When it gets to petrol bombing I think you are talking about a different

category from breaking windows.” [FLOB A34]

35 E.g. König (1980, 1995), Ljung (1980), Wright (1995), Huddleston and Pullum (2002), Kearns (2003), Smitterberg (2005) and Levin (this volume).

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Based on cases in LOB and FLOB that clearly embody these features, we estimate that interpretive use of the present progressive nearly doubled in frequency (from 52 cases to 97 cases) in BrE between 1961 and 1991. However, despite this explanatory promise, it should be noted that the number of indeterminate cases encountered in each corpus is frustratingly high (approximately 200-300 in LOB and FLOB), and we still have some way to go before we can confirm its impact on the recent expansion of the progressive. 3.2 The passive

3.2.1 BE-passive

For the BE-passive, a decline in frequency pmw is recorded across each interval of the Brown family, starting with a relatively small drop of 4.3 percent from BLOB-1931 to LOB, extending to 12.6 percent between LOB and FLOB, and 12.4 percent from FLOB to BE06.36 The last of these reductions is particularly marked given that it occurs across a period of just 15 years. In AmE meanwhile, the decline of the passive between the early 1960s and early 1990s, at 28.2 percent, is even steeper than in BrE (Leech et al. 2009: 297). A modified form of the query on COHA (is|are|was|were|be|been [vvn]) echoes this finding, right across the twentieth century.37 [Insert Figure 9 about here]

Predictably, the frequencies throughout the 75-year period of BrE are highest in Learned/Academic writing. This register is known for its impersonalizing style, with most instances of the passive promoting an inanimate entity to topic/subject position, and suppressing the agent, as in (38) and (39): (38) The rate of interest is assumed to depend on the quantity of money, actual

output and the price level. (LOB J46) (39) At higher energies use is generally made of orbital accelerators in which

charged particles are confined to move in circular orbits by a magnetic field. (FLOB J01)

Learned/Academic writing is also famously resistant to change (Hundt and Mair 1999), and a downturn in the passive – albeit a precipitous one – is only noticeable after 1961. A similar finding is made by Seoane and Williams (2006) in natural science and medicine texts, where the frequency of the passive falls dramatically against that of transitive active clauses in the second half of the twentieth century.38 The new twenty-first century corpus, BE06, however, suggests that the decline is

36 We estimate the precision of the query run on these corpora to be between 80 and 87 per cent. For details of the queries, see Leech et al. (2009: 148n). 37 Nelson et al. (2002) advocate calculating the frequency of the BE-passive relative to transitive active clauses. However, this is not feasible in the Brown family, nor indeed COHA, as there is no overt marking of transitivity on verbs. 38 Seoane and Williams (2006) and Williams (this volume) also note the exceptional nature of legal texts, which, in some English-speaking countries, continue to be extremely reluctant to cut down on use of the passive.

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tailing off. Press writing, by contrast, is an early adopter of the change, and the passive shrinks at a steady rate throughout. This is probably attributable to pressure on journalists to write in a more accessible, ‘direct’ style (see below), despite the competing pressure – which the agentless passive facilitates – to write concisely. Fiction, meanwhile, records a shallow but steady decline, with the lowest number of examples throughout. This register, like conversation, is concerned with human characters and their actions and thoughts, and accordingly favours active VP structures over passive ones (see e.g. Biber et al. 1999: 939-940). As with the progressive, a possible factor influencing changing frequencies of the passive is a shift towards conversational speech patterns, i.e. colloquialization. In this case, however, colloquialization leads to a reduction, rather than an increase in frequency. The passive has in addition been a conspicuous target of prescriptivism, with widespread attacks on its alleged lack of accessibility or transparency in comparison to equivalent forms in the (transitive) active. Seoane and Williams (2006) have surveyed a plethora of attacks on the passive in twentieth-century style guides, noting that they have generally intensified since the 1970s/1980s, and have been more virulent in the United States than in Britain. Writers are advised to avoid the passive wherever it is ‘unnecessary’ or even ‘stuffy’, particularly in contexts where an equivalent in the active is – supposedly – more direct and transparent in meaning.39 The following examples from a hobby magazine (The Motor Cycle) in BLOB-1931 seem highly non-colloquial, and arguably contribute to the dated ring of the text: (40) A new type of handlebar has been adopted; though following Rudge lines, it

has grouped control levers adjustable for angle. In addition, electrically equipped models will all be fitted with a stop light as standard. This light consists of an additional bulb and ruby glass in the Miller tubular-type tail light; it is automatically lighted by the application of the brakes, since an electrical contact is made by the movement of the brake pedal. (BLOB-1931 E03)

However, an interesting pattern emerges when we refine our corpus queries, distinguishing between different tense/mood/aspect combinations with the be-passive. Particularly marked is a difference in the speed of decline of non-finite passives compared to that of finite passives: see Figures 10 and 11.40 [Insert Figure 10 about here] [Insert Figure 11 about here] Finite passives decline by 4.0 percent, 14.0 percent and 13.1 percent between the respective sampling dates, and altogether by 28.3 percent between 1931 and 2006 (all changes significant). Non-finite passives are certainly less common than finite passives, but their frequency changes comparatively little (a decline of 6.9 percent between 1931 and 1961, an increase of 0.2 percent between 1961 and 1991, and a decrease of 6.3 percent between 1991 and 2006). Only with the addition of BE06 does the net change across the period become significant (-12.6 percent, p < .001).

39 See e.g. the Plain English Campaign online guide How to write in plain English, http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/free-guides.html, accessed 31/07/2010. 40 These figures exclude progressive passives.

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Reflecting the relative resilience of non-finite passives, recent examples such as (41) and (42) hardly sound ‘stuffy’: (41) Fourteen months ago, Lucky didn’t even look like a Springer. Before being

taken to vet Denise Lambert, she couldn’t climb stairs, could barely stand, and would collapse on walks. (FLOB E14)

(42) So why doesn’t it work as a piece of English to be spoken aloud? (FLOB F03) It could be that writers and readers of usage guides, grammar checkers and so on are unaware that non-finite forms are instantiations of the passive voice. Passive examples cited in these sources are almost invariably finite. If non-finite passives are less saliently passive, they may be relatively immune to anti-passive proscriptions. 3.2.2 GET-passive

For a long time the word get – and by association, the GET-passive – was marginalized in print, being perceived perhaps as too colloquial (Johansson and Oksfjell 1996). However, the dramatic fall recently of the be-passive begs the question of the extent to which the get-passive has gained at its expense, as part of the posited process of colloquialization. The borderline between the dynamic use of GET-passives and cases where it is used more statively is sometimes difficult to delimit. Ambiguous cases include (46), describing the early development of the tango in Buenos Aires, where refined could be interpreted statively as an adjective equivalent to ‘classy’, or as a passive, equivalent to ‘had refinements made to it’:41 (43) Graduating to theatres and cabarets, and getting refined in the process, the

dance enjoyed a famous tea-room craze. (FLOB C10) Even by the most conservative estimate, the GET-passive increases more than fivefold across three-quarters of a century, with 15 (BLOB-1931), 42 (LOB), 56 (FLOB) and 84 (BE06) instances respectively. The near-50 percent rise between 1991 and 2006 suggests strongly that it is still on the increase.42 [Insert Figure 12 about here] However, it seems that the GET-passive is still prevented from competing more substantively against the BE-passive because of constraints on its usage. Examples in all periods predominantly involve adversity or benefit (Huddleston and Pullum et al.

2002: 1442), and very rarely a neutral evaluation of a situation. Often there is also an implication that the subject of the get-passive contributes to the realization of the action, cf. (45): (44) Even when I got sent off to boarding school, home was only a couple of miles

down the road. (BE06 G38) (45) It is extremely easy to get caught napping on the line. (FLOB E17)

41 We discarded reflexive examples such as get dressed. 42 Again for AmE we have confirmation of the same direction of change in COHA, with an overall doubling of frequency of the get-passive from the 1930s to the 2000s.

22

5 Conclusion

The Brown family of corpora has played a pioneering role in studies of recent, short-term change in English grammar. In the present paper the BrE data has been expanded, shedding more light on the increasing use of most of the emergent modals, not-contractions, the progressive, and the GET-passive, as well as the declining use of the majority of core modals and the BE-passive. We now have evidence that the decline of the BE-passive accelerated in the course of the twentieth century, whereas the progressive BE-passive, contrary to what might be expected from 1961 to 1991, has not shown significant overall growth between 1931 and 2006. Moreover, the availability of POS-tagged versions of the corpora, with sophisticated query software such as CQP/CQPweb, offers us a more refined perspective on recent grammatical change than the raw corpora alone can give. It reveals that the passive and the progressive, for example, have not increased uniformly across the board; rather the gains (and a few losses) have been concentrated in particular parts of the paradigm.

We have argued that no single formula is completely dependable for determining the frequencies of a given construction, and hence its rate of change. Where practical, it is advisable to use more than one method of calculation to validate one’s findings. With the Brown family corpora, however, the uniformity of size (c. 1 million words each), and the care taken to match text type samples across periods, justifies normalizing the frequencies of a given construction to ‘per million words’ values, despite the inherent risk of overlooking the competition. In the cases where we have been able to apply either a proportional method, or an ‘ecological’ method, in general we have found the results of the pmw method to be supported, in some cases with important qualifications (as in the case of not-contractions in Fiction), but so far never radically altered. The expansion of the Brown family has moreover earned it added credibility as a resource for informing hypotheses and explanations of recent language change. The growing use, across the period, of contractions, (active) present progressives, GET-passives and emergent modals provides convincing further evidence of colloquialization (Mair 1998). The decline of must, shall and the BE-passive represents a form of negative evidence of the same process. To the extent that they imitate developments observable between Brown and Frown – but with frequency shifts starting later – they also provide evidence for the Americanization, i.e. contact influence such that BrE becomes more like AmE. Naturally, the incorporation of further British and American members to the Brown family (BLOB-1901 and B-Brown-1931 are in preparation) will extend the opportunities for description and explanation. It would be naïve to assume that the Brown family is the ‘one stop shop’ for any investigation of recent change in standard English. Its most obvious limitation is size. Certain types of syntactic construction (e.g. that-clause subjects) occur too thinly to allow thorough descriptions, and the omission of spoken data makes it an unsuitable place to explore, for instance, left dislocations (e.g. This bloke, he cracked

up [BNC KC2]), discourse markers (well, anyway(s)), or tag questions. This is certainly an argument for using other corpora such as COHA, where such constructions will be better represented. For this paper, where we concentrate on middling-frequency features of standard English, we have certainly benefitted from COHA (in Beta version) in endorsing and adding historical depth to the findings on

23

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Tables and Figures

Table 1: The Brown family of corpora (* denotes incomplete members)

1901 1931 1961 1991/2 2006 BrE BLOB-1901* BLOB-1931 LOB FLOB

BE06

AmE B-Brown*

Brown Frown

Table 2: Decreasing core modals and increasing emergent modals pmw in written BrE

– as observed in the four Brown family corpora BLOB-1931, LOB, FLOB and BE06

BLOB 1931 LOB 1961 FLOB 1991 BE06 2006

core modals 15,299 15,120 13,681 12,496

emergent modals 1,697 2,210 2,408 2,383

Note: Each ‘step’ to the right in the table is statistically significant at the level of p < 0.01 or (usually) higher, with the exception of the 1931-1961 step for core modals, where the decrease is very small, and the 1991-2006 step for emergent modals, where there is actually a slight decrease in contrast to the anticipated increase. Not surprisingly the overall change from 1931 to 2006 is in both cases is extremely significant.

29

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

7,000

8,000

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

Gen Prose

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 1: Increase in negative contractions per million words (pmw):

comparing the BLOB-1931, LOB, FLOB and BE06 corpora.

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

Gen Prose

Learned

Fiction

Overall

30

Figure 2: Increase in negative contractions as a percentage of not-negation:

comparing the BLOB-1931, LOB, FLOB and BE06 corpora.

Figure 3: Schematic diagram of the semantic field of obligation/necessity

be

bound

to

CORE MODALS

must need(n’t) be to

(shall) (ought to)

(should)

EMERGENT MODALS

have

to need

to

be supposed

to

(have)

got

to

(had)

better

LEXICAL EXPRESSION OF MODALITY

be obliged

be forced

to

be essential

be required

need (noun) need (trans. verb)

obligatory

necessarily

be

necessary

necessity

requirement

obligation

etc.

etc.

etc.

31

0

200

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

1,400

1,600

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

MUST

SHALL

SHOULD

NEED

OUGHT (to)

BE to

Figure 4: Decline of core modals relating to obligation/necessity: frequencies pmw

0

200

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

1931 1961 1991

Press

Gen Prose

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 5: Increase in frequency of have to pmw 1931-1991 in BrE, representing subcorpora as well as the overall trend

32

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

Gen Prose

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 6: Progressive passives pmw in BrE 1931-2006

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

Gen Prose

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 7: Modal + progressive combinations pmw in BrE 1931-2006

33

0

500

1,000

1,500

2,000

2,500

3,000

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

Gen Prose

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 8: Present Progressive (active) in BrE 1931-2006: frequencies pmw

0

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

Gen Prose

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 9: Be-passives pmw in BrE 1931-2006 (Note: Figures exclude the progressive be-passive)

34

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

14,000

16,000

18,000

20,000

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

GnProse

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 10: Finite be-passives pmw in BrE 1931-2006

0

200

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

1,400

1,600

1,800

2,000

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

GnProse

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 11: Nonfinite be-passives pmw in BrE 1931-2006

35

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

1931 1946 1961 1976 1991 2006

Press

GnProse

Learned

Fiction

Overall

Figure 12: Get-passives pmw in BrE 1931-2006