A radically usage-based, collostructional approach to assessing the differences between negative modal contractions and their parent forms

Abstract

Starting from the premise that English negative modal contractions constitute partly variable patterns of associations that include both the preceding subject and the following verb infinitive, the study sets out to investigate distributional differences between can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t and their corresponding uncontracted parent forms. Given that some configurations are assumed to correlate with specific modal meanings (e.g. inanimate subjects and stative verbs > ‘epistemic prediction’; first person subjects > ‘(un)willingness’ or ‘commissive modality’), roughly 200,000 trigrams from COCA are submitted to distinctive covarying collexeme analysis in order to uncover if these contractions and their full forms are conventionalized and entrenched differentially enough to merit their separate treatment on both conceptual and methodological grounds. The results point to probabilistic tendencies, suggesting a cline where won’t and can’t appear to be more emancipated from their respective full-form analogue than shouldn’t. Furthermore, the study showcases how collostructional methods can be applied fruitfully to case studies embedded in Schmid’s (Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2020. The dynamics of the linguistic system: Usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press) Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model.