‘How many taxis there needs to be?’ The sociolinguistic variation of need to in spoken British English

Abstract

This paper explores need to, a semi-modal of obligation and necessity, and its semantic variation in connection with the sociolinguistic variables of gender, age and social class in the spoken demographic part of the British National Corpus. The semantic/pragmatic uses of need to include internal, deontic, dynamic and epistemic domains based both on traditional concepts and cross-linguistic studies. The sociolinguistic analysis applies the generalisations by Labov, but pays attention to the interactional styles and the communicative needs of the various social groups as well. The results reveal that need to is undergoing change. It shows monotonic distribution among adults, but it is slightly more common among men than women, and, in terms of social class, the upper middle class takes the lead. The semantic variation corroborates these findings – older speakers stick to the more traditional domains – but also reflects the gendered life stages and discourse styles of the speaker groups.

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