A Sociolinguistic Study On The Variation Of Modals Of Necessity Must And Have To In Spoken English

As two variants under the same variable rules,must and have to share the close linguistic functions and semantic meanings while expressing necessity.Native speakers'choice on these two modals is not at random but constrained by various factors.Based on the corpus of BNC64,the present study explores the different uses of must and have to in co-occurrence patterns across the internal and external factors,through the multi-factorial analysis combined with quantitative and qualitative approaches.The research questions are:(1)Is native British speakers' choice of must and have to systematic?(2)If the choice is systematic,how do the linguistic factors influence the native speakers' choice of must and have to?(3)How do such social factors as gender,age,social class,region and occupation influence the choice of must and have to?Results indicate that:(1)Native British speakers' choice of must and have to is systematic.Regarding to the various factors involved in this study,eight internal variables(including Sense,Subject person,Subject referent animacy,Verb type,Clause type,Sentence type,Subject number and Subject referent number)and an external factor(Age)play an influential role in the different use of the two variants.(2)Various internal factors have different effects on the uses of must and have to.For sense,have to is strongly characterized by dynamic and deontic meaning,which convey a mood of intention,obligation or promise.must is mainly characterized by epistemic meaning to make a judgment based on facts;for verb type,have to has preference for accomplishment,achievement and process verbs,while must has a clear preference for state verbs;for subject referent animacy,inanimate subjects are preferred by must,as opposed to have to,which prefers animate subjects more;for subject person,must yields a preference for third-person subject pronouns,while have to is preferred with both first-and second-person pronouns.Besides,results of distinctive collexeme analysis on the two variants agree with the conclusion above.(3)Among the external factors,only age makes a significant difference on the uses of must and have to.Speakers aged 14-54 use have to more frequently than must in the spoken language,while speakers aged over 55 prefer must more in speaking.It is worth mentioning that as for the three age groups,the effect size of Age-C(55+)is the largest.According to the crosstab analyses,variable gender and social class play an influential role in Age-C,wherein both women and men prefer must than have to.Speakers from middle class and working class/underclass use must more frequently than have to in their daily speaking.This study provides a new perspective for modals researches by applying the variationist sociolinguistics,which helps to enrich and perfect the relevant theory and promote the development of language variation.Besides,the multi-factorial analysis provides a novel method to make further researches in this area.The rules towards the choice of must and have to revealed in the results can serve as a reference for English speakers and learners to conduct communication activities successfully.