# Necessity modal development in Singapore English

Carmelo Alessandro Basile

► To cite this version:

Carmelo Alessandro Basile. Necessity modal development in Singapore English. English World-Wide, 2023, 44 (2), 10.1075/eww.22019.bas. hal-03988751

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# Necessity modal development in Singapore English

An investigation of substratist and contact-grammaticalisation approaches

Carmelo Alessandro Basile

Université Paris Cité, France

[Please note that this is a pre-final draft; please consult the following printed version for referencing: Basile, Carmelo Alessandro. 2024. Necessity modal development in Singapore English: An investigation of substratist and contact-grammaticalisation approaches. *English World-Wide* 44: 276-302. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.22019.bas]

Spoken in a multilingual environment characterised by continuous contacts with other languages, Singapore English (SgE) is a singular object of study. Its modal system has also been developing in independent ways compared to inner-circle varieties, e.g. British English, its historical ancestor. Different approaches have attempted to explain such developments, including the substratist and the grammaticalisation approaches. The present paper explores both these approaches with the aim of examining the role that they may have in the development of the (semi-)modal verbs of necessity in SgE. Using some corpus analysis conducted on informal data, it will be shown why the substratist approach does not seem sufficient to explain the relatively frequent non-epistemic uses of *must* in SgE. It will be discussed how SgE *must* could be instead replicating older dynamic uses, typical of Middle English times (1100–1500 CE), according to a process known as replica-grammaticalisation as recapitulation (Ziegeler 2014).
**Keywords:** modality, necessity, modal *must*, substratum theories, contact-grammaticalisation, Singapore English, variation, corpus analysis, dynamic modality

# 1. Introduction

The English spoken in Singapore (SgE) has been the object of a good number of studies in past literature (e.g. Platt and Weber 1980; Gupta 1992; Lim 2004; Deterding 2007; Bao 2005, 2015; Ziegeler 2003a, 2012, 2015, 2020). A few studies have also focused on its modal system (e.g. Bao 2010; Ziegeler 2014; Hansen 2018; Loureiro-Porto 2019), in comparison with other world Englishes. From substratist to contact-grammaticalisation approaches, scholars have carried out investigations to explain the independent parallel development of some modal verbs in SgE next to other varieties of English, such as British English (BrE), its historical ancestor. Whereas Bao (2010) explained the frequent non-epistemic uses of SgE *must* through a case of “convergence-to-substratum”, Ziegeler (2014) referred to Heine and Kuteva’s (2003, 2005) contact-grammaticalisation theories to explain the habitual uses of *will* in Singapore by introducing a hypothesis of “replica grammaticalisation as recapitulation”. Yet, with a few notable exceptions (i.e. Hansen 2018; Loureiro-Porto 2019), little has been done to describe the necessity modal paradigm in SgE, and the complex role of substrate and contact-grammaticalisation in its development. Similarly, to present knowledge, no diachronic studies have explained whether the modal system in SgE is changing, following an endonormative or an exonormative development. In other words, it is not clear whether SgE modal verbs are continuing to develop independently from other inner-circle (Kachru 1986, 1992) varieties, or whether at some point they will follow inner-circle tendencies. Apparent-time evidence provided by Hansen (2018) would show that outer-circle varieties are following the same modal development as inner-circle varieties, where semi-modals of necessity are increasing, and core *must* is decreasing in frequency.

Building on Loureiro-Porto's (2019) work on the grammaticalisation of semi-modals of necessity in Asian Englishes, the present paper aims to explain the development of the necessity modal paradigm in SgE through the approaches provided by Bao (2010) and Ziegeler (2014). More precisely, (semi-)modal verbs of necessity (i.e. *must*, *have to*, (*have*) *got to*, and *gotta*) will be analysed in a set of corpora collected from the 1990s to 2021: *The International Corpus of English (ICE)*, *The Flowerpod Corpus*, *The HardwareZone Corpus*, and *The Salary*
*Corpus*. The variety of data covering three decades will offer a micro-diachronic study intended to describe general semantic tendencies over the years. The study will attempt to answer the following three research questions (RQs):

- **RQ1.** Does the modal system of necessity in SgE replicate that of Mandarin Chinese?

- **RQ2.** Can Ziegeler's (2014) theory explain the relatively frequent non-epistemic use of *must* in SgE today?

- **RQ3.** What is the role and use of the other necessity modals in SgE compared to BrE?

Section 2 will provide background information on English in Singapore; Section 3 will focus on past and current studies on modality in SgE. Section 4 will describe the analysed corpora as well as the methodology used to exploit them; Section 5 will deal with the results of the corpus analysis. Section 6 will open a discussion sketching a complex scenario where both Bao's (2010) and Ziegeler's (2014) approaches seem to have a role to play. Section 7 will conclude the study.

## 2. Background

English shares the status of official language of the Republic of Singapore with Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. Whereas Singapore's resident population belongs to different ethnicities (74.3 per cent Chinese, 13.5 per cent Malays, 9 per cent Indians, and 3.2 "others"), English is the language used for interethnic communication as well as for education (Census of Population 2021). Its presence on the island started in 1819, with the arrival of the British, who established a tariff-free base meant to have a strategic position to enter the Malacca Straits. Two hundred years later, Singapore has become the only country in Asia where virtually everyone speaks some English (Deterding 2007).

The categorization of SgE has been studied extensively in literature. It has been defined as a post-colonial or “New English” contact variety by Platt, Weber, and Ho (1984) and placed by Schneider (2003, 2007) in the “endonormative stabilization” phase of his dynamic model of postcolonial Englishes. This phase corresponds to the stabilisation of a new variety independent from the original coloniser's variety, i.e. BrE. The influence of different Chinese dialects (i.e. the substrate) and of the other official languages (i.e. the adstrate) results in a great degree of grammatical restructuring and variation. Two sub-varieties constitute SgE: Colloquial Singapore English (CSE or “Singlish”) and Standard Singapore English (SSE), the former being the variety used informally on a daily basis, and
the latter the variety used formally and for official purposes. Gupta (1991) first mentioned a diglossic situation for SgE, due to the co-existence of these two sub-varieties. Alsagoff (2010) later built on this approach by introducing her Cultural Orientation Model. According to this model, each SgE speaker chooses to have a local or global orientation, which will affect their speech by being more or less characterised by elements from either SSE or CSE. Leimgruber (2009, 2013) refers instead to an indexical type of diglossia in which speakers choose from their inventory elements from either subvariety according to the purpose of their communicative acts. Nonetheless, despite its high degree of nativisation, the use of CSE remains largely discouraged by some residual conservatism and a linguistic policy meant to minimise the use of Singlish in Singapore (Wee 2011; Leimgruber et al. 2020).

3. Previous accounts on modality in CSE

3.1 Bao’s (2010) “convergence-to-substratum”

Substrate and adstrate languages play a major role in the development of SgE. Frequent contact with other typologically different languages results in numerous cases of language transfer, as the use of clause-final particles (e.g. *lah*, *ah*, *lor*, etc.) calqued from Chinese dialects. Bao (2010) argues that the influence of these languages may also have a role in shaping the modal system of SgE. He shows, for instance, that in SgE the modal verb *must* is more often used with non-epistemic meanings (83.9 per cent of total), and only rarely epistemically (16.2 per cent of total), compared to other English varieties where epistemic uses are progressively replacing the non-epistemic ones (Collins 2005). He claims that this happens because of the direct influence of Mandarin, according to a process that he names “convergence-to-substratum”, i.e. when “a lexical or grammatical feature from the lexifier language acquires new lexical or grammatical meanings from the equivalent feature in the linguistic substratum” (Bao 2015: 163).<fnref n="1" /> More

<footnote n="1">¹ Bao (2005: 238) recognises that, alongside Mandarin, other Chinese dialects are spoken in Singapore (e.g. Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew). However, he supports Chao’s (1968: 13) claim that all these dialects share the same “universal Chinese grammar”. This motivates Bao’s choice of referring to Mandarin only in his “convergence-to-substratum” theory. Mandarin, Cantonese and Southern Min dialects use indeed different modal constructions to express non-epistemic and epistemic meanings of necessity, as discussed by Matthews and Yip (2011) for Cantonese and Chen (2020) for Southern Min.</footnote>
precisely, Bao (2010) argues that Mandarin makes use of two different particles for the deontic and for the epistemic meanings, and there is no real correspondence to English *must*, which may express both the deontic (or non-epistemic) (1) and the epistemic (2) meanings, as seen in the following examples from the British component of ICE (ICE-GB):

(1) Oh we **mustn't** be too late then. (Bao 2010: 1730, ICE-GB: s1a-094, my emphasis)

(2) It **must** be a highly ingenious cat. (Bao 2010: 1730, ICE-GB: s1a-061, my emphasis)

*Must* in SgE is therefore used similarly to the Mandarin deontic particle *bìxū* (3), which has not yet grammaticalised to epistemic functions. In Mandarin, the epistemic function is indeed expressed through the adverbs *bìdìng* or *yìdìng*, as seen in (4) (Bao 2010: 1732, my emphasis).

(3) wǒmen **bìxū** jiānchí zhēnlǐ
we **must** abide-by truth
‘We **must** abide by the truth’.

(4) zhè zhǒng cáiliào **yìdìng** jiēshì
this CL [classifier] material **certainly** solid
‘This type of material **must** be solid’.

Bao also claims that epistemic occurrences of *must* are rarer in SgE since the construction *must have V-en* is decreasing in this variety, as his corpus analysis shows. Finally, he suggests that the grammaticalisation path that *must* has undergone in the history of the English language is not followed by the equivalent expressions in Chinese. Starting from Traugott (1989), he believes that the same grammaticalisation path that we can find in traditional varieties of English (deontic > epistemic) cannot occur in SgE, as this would mean that SgE speakers would have access to the grammaticalisation history of the lexifier language, i.e. English, thus excluding the possibility that processes of contact-grammaticalisation may also have an impact.

## 3.2 Contact-grammaticalisation theories

Research on contact-grammaticalisation has been revitalised by works such as Heine and Kuteva (2003, 2005) who theorised the models of “contact-induced grammaticalization” and “replica grammaticalization” (Heine and Kuteva 2003: 533–539). Ziegeler (2014) makes use of these theories to explain the habitual uses of *will* in SgE. She finds that such uses are more productive in SgE than in BrE,
and claims that some over-generalised uses of modal verbs may be rather
explained through a recapitulation of earlier diachronic stages in the lexifier
language, i.e. English. Accordingly, the relatively frequent habitual use of *will* in
SgE today is seen as a replication of the initial stages of the habitual meaning of
*will* in Old and Middle English times. Indeed, since Old English times, English
*will* has grammaticalised into different meanings: its original volitional meaning
developed a proclivity meaning (i.e. habit or natural tendency), shifting later to
probability and prediction, as shown in the grammaticalisation path of *will* below
(5) (Ziegeler 2014: 128).

(5) volition > proclivity > probability > prediction

The quite productive habitual use of *will* in SgE today, exemplified in (6) and (7),
is explained through the replication of the old proclivity use of the modal verb,
which was recorded around 850 and 950 CE, as shown in (8), from *Alfred's Cura
Pastoralis*. Such a phenomenon would represent a case of replica
grammaticalisation as recapitulation, according to Ziegeler's (2014: 132)
definition of the term.

(6) But usually I **will** just eat it straight from the cup ... don't really bother to add some more fruits. (Ziegeler 2014: 122, *The Flowerpod Corpus*<fnref n="2" />, posted by: *jadedollie*, July 25, 2008, my emphasis)

(7) A little more info. Pure honey **will** not attract ants. (Ziegeler 2014: 122, *The Flowerpod Corpus*, posted by: *babyOctopus*, September 3, 2005, my emphasis)

(8) Be ðæm is awriten ðæt se hund wille etan ðæt he ær aspaw, & sio sugu hi wille sylian on hire sole æfterðæm ðe hio aðwægen bið.

‘Therefore it is written that the dog will eat what he formerly vomited, and the sow will wallow in her mire after being washed’. (850–950). (Ziegeler 2014: 127, *Alfred’s Cura Pastoralis*, ed. Sweet. R 54.419.26, Helsinki Corpus, HDCET, my emphasis)

Ziegeler's replica grammaticalisation as recapitulation follows Heine and Kuteva's (2003: 539) model of replica grammaticalisation which is explained through (9):

(9) Replica grammaticalisation

a. Speakers of language **R** [the replica language] notice in language **M** [the model language] a grammatical category **Mx**.

<footnote n="2">² See Section 4 for a complete description of *The Flowerpod Corpus*.</footnote>
b. They develop an equivalent category **Rx**, using material available in their own language (**R**).

c. To this end, they replicate a grammaticalisation process they assume to have taken place in language **M**, using an analogical formula of the kind
$[My > Mx] = [Ry > Rx].$

d. They grammaticalise category **Ry** to **Rx**.

However, Ziegeler claims that while R is SgE, M is not the substrate or any adstrate language spoken in Singapore, but English itself, seen as the lexifier or source language of R.<fnref n="3" /> The older proclivity use of *will* in SgE today thus corresponds to stage c, as Ry is being grammaticalised to Rx, following the analogical grammaticalisation path available in M.

Loureiro-Porto (2019) also exploits grammaticalisation theories to account for the relationship between modals and semi-modals of necessity. She studies the degree of grammaticalisation of semi-modals of necessity in different Asian Englishes, including SgE, and their tendency to gradually replace core modal *must*. She concludes that whereas some Asian Englishes – such as Hong Kong English – show a replacement similar to inner-circle varieties, SgE tends to be more “conservative in the frequency and meaning of *must*” (Loureiro-Porto 2019: 128).

## 4. Data, methods, and terminology

The methodology adopted in this study is based on the analysis of five different corpora, as shown in Table 1.

<table><caption>**Table 1.** The analysed corpora</caption><thead><tr><td>Corpus</td><td>Variety</td><td>Word count</td><td>Period</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>The International Corpus of English – Great Britain (ICE-GB)</td><td>BrE</td><td>360,000</td><td>1990s</td></tr><tr><td>The International Corpus of English – Singapore (ICE-SIN)</td><td>SgE</td><td>360,000</td><td>1990s</td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote n="3">³ Heine and Kuteva’s (2003, 2005) step (9c) has often been criticised as it would imply that speakers of R have access to the history of M. As mentioned in Ziegeler (2017: 318), though, Pietsch (2009) demonstrates that (9) is not problematic as long as both the older and newer stages of the grammaticalisationcline of Mx co-exist. Matthews and Yip (2009) also support this hypothesis in their study of Cantonese-English bilingual child’s ontogenetic grammaticalisation of *give*.</footnote>
<table><tr><td>The Flowerpod Corpus</td><td>SgE</td><td>587,351</td><td>2000s</td></tr><tr><td>The HardwareZone Corpus (HWZC)</td><td>SgE</td><td>525,882</td><td>2010s-2020s</td></tr><tr><td>The Salary Corpus</td><td>SgE</td><td>481,893</td><td>2010s-2020s</td></tr></table>

ICE was used as a source to compare BrE and SgE interactions in texts having the same style and genre. The spoken sections of ICE-GB and ICE-SIN (S1A-001 to S1B-080), were chosen for their higher degree of spontaneity compared to their written counterpart.

Informal interactions on Singaporean blogs were also analysed by using two other corpora, *The Flowerpod Corpus* and *The HardwareZone Corpus* (HWZC). The former, compiled by Debra Ziegeler and Amelyn Thompson between 2007 and 2009, contains data taken from blogs from the 2000s. *The Flowerpod* data tend to be more informal and spontaneous than the data coming from ICE because of its more stratified sampling frame. Grouping unscripted chats related to different topics selected from different internet websites, *The Flowerpod Corpus* includes heterogeneous data coming from contributors of different age, gender, and cultural backgrounds. HWZC was compiled for this study by using contemporary data from the 2010s to February 2021 extracted from the blog section of *hardwarezone.com.sg*, which deals with technology news, gadget reviews, updates on new technologies, etc. The size of this corpus (525,882 tokens) is almost equivalent to *The Flowerpod Corpus* (587,351 tokens). In the two blog corpora message repetitions – which are very common in this kind of environment – have been eliminated and are therefore not included in the final size count.

A fifth and final corpus of similar size (481,883 tokens), named *The Salary Corpus*, served as a control corpus. Blog chats related to the topics of job hunting and professional careers, coming from the Singaporean website *salary.sg*, have been used to compile the corpus. The corpus has been included to ensure that the results from the corpus analysis were not affected by the genre of texts. Such a control corpus is indeed different in composition compared to HWZC or *The Flowerpod Corpus*. Albeit informal in style, the topics are different, and the contributors are probably more mixed, not belonging to a specific group (e.g. the hi-tech enthusiasts in HWZC). Moreover, *The Salary Corpus* contains data from the 2010s up to early 2021 and represents therefore a counterpart to HWZC as both the corpora are contemporary.

Despite the heterogeneous content of the analysed corpora, by choosing four Singaporean corpora compiled from the 1990s to 2021, it is easier to investigate diachronically how necessity modals have been used in the past 30 years and to
sketch whether there has been an ongoing change. The composition of the blogs where the data come from allows us to have a rich variety of necessity modals as these blogs deal, as mentioned before, with reviews and recommendations on new technologies, cosmetics, food, motorcycle maintenance, etc.

However, it needs to be pointed out that there are some limitations in this corpus analysis. First, the five corpora are not really comparable, as their design is not identical, except for the two ICE sub-corpora. The written online data extracted from the blog corpora is indeed different from the transcribed spoken data of ICE. Second, in all the analysed Singaporean corpora, no extralinguistic information on the contributors (e.g. ethnicity, first language, age, education level, etc.) is known. Such metadata should be incorporated in future studies to better examine general sociolinguistic tendencies. Measuring age effects, for instance, would be crucial to providing apparent-time evidence. Third, the types of websites used to compile the blog corpora make the contributions open to anyone. It can be assumed that the majority of the users of such corpora are Singaporeans, as they deal with Singaporean matters, but it is not possible to claim that all the analysed data come from Singaporeans. Similarly, the number of contributors who have Chinese dialects, Malay, or Tamil as their first language is unknown.

Occurrences of necessity modal verbs (i.e. *must*, *have to*, (*have*) *got to*, and phonologically reduced *gotta*) in the five corpora have been retrieved and analysed semantically, using *Sketch Engine* (version 2.36.5), a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing. Repetitions, obscure occurrences, and false starts were excluded in the final count, as well as constructions that are believed to be learnt by the speaker as chunks (e.g. *it has to do with*). The past-tense and non-finite forms of non-epistemic *have to* (e.g. *had to*, *having to*, *to have to*, etc.) were not considered, in order to compare this semi-modal with *must*, where these forms cannot be found because of its auxiliary nature. Negative occurrences of *have to* have also been excluded as the negation falls outside the scope of the modal, differently from *must* where the negation is usually within the scope of its non-epistemic use (cf. Palmer 1990: 75–76; Collins 2009: 66).

The semantic analysis of each modal or semi-modal verb has been carried out by using three main modal categories, these being dynamic, deontic, and epistemic. As will be discussed in Section 5.2, Gregersen (2020: 65–68) argues that these macro-categories represent three diachronic moments in the grammaticalisation cline of *must*. Hence their utility in a diachronic investigation of the necessity modal paradigm in SgE. Gregersen’s definition of dynamic includes van der Auwera and Plungian’s (1998) domain of “participant-external necessity”, Depraetere and Verhulst’s (2008: 4) “discourse-external modality”,
and Narrog’s (2012) “circumstantial modality”. Dynamic necessity relates therefore to those “circumstances that are external to the participant, if any, engaged in the state of affairs and that make this state of affairs [...] necessary” (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 80), as shown in (10). The speaker does not impose any kind of obligation, the necessity being the result of some general and external regulations/circumstances.

(10) Alternatively if you're Singaporean, have decent intelligence (i.e., know the difference between MBA and MBS), can converse interestingly, then you can still pull through with lower GMAT (perhaps in the 600s or even high 500s). BUT.... you still **must** have key differentiator. e.g., you write well, you run an interesting business, you are a community leader, you are a defender of human rights, etc. all these help. (*Salary Corpus*, posted by: *anonymous*, July 5, 2012, my emphasis)

The diachronic interest of dynamic modality is discussed by Gisborne (2007: 44) who claims that dynamic modality “simply reflects the retention of an earlier non-modal meaning through the grammaticalisation of a subset of modal verbs”. He adds that dynamic modality is not performative and is temporally marked, not being directly bound to the speech event. Furthermore, he agrees with Ziegeler (2003b) by claiming that it “lacks subjectivity”, as “both deontic and epistemic modality have subjective senses, so in this way, dynamic modality is different from other kinds of modality” (Gisborne 2007: 45).

To summarise, in this paper dynamic necessity corresponds to those uses where there is no obligation imposed by the speaker – which is instead the main feature of deontic uses – at the time of speaking, and where the realisation of the event is not the result of the will of the speaker or agent. Dynamic uses (11) tend to have generic subjects, differently from deontic uses (12), often expressed by performative propositions with 2nd person subjects. Finally, dynamic uses have to do with circumstances, rules, regulations, physical or natural laws, etc. As (11) shows, dynamic modality may also refer to internal need dictated by external conditions as long as there is no deontic source involved.

(11) **Dynamic**: i hate to wash clothes esp those need hand washed, **must** scrub first then rinse with water. (*The Flowerpod Corpus*, posted by: *phoebella*, August 28, 2006, my emphasis)

(12) **Deontic**: And perhaps, you may need to think about having your future kids be taken care of by others... I'm just thinking of the worst scenario, but you **must** take care of yourselves and your families nes time. Give within your
means.... All the best! (*The Flowerpod Corpus*, posted by: *blur85*,
November 2, 2006, my emphasis)

(13) **Epistemic**: As for this game being very time consuming, it is done on purpose as developers wanted players to be invested in the game. You **must** be mistaken and 'bashing' is a strong word. (HWZC, posted by: *Remless*, October 6, 2020, my emphasis)

By using the categories described above and illustrated in (11), (12), and (13) as a yardstick, the different modal occurrences have been manually analysed and compared using descriptive statistics to discover general tendencies in SgE data from the 1990s to present, and between SgE and BrE data in general. Choosing between one semantic category or the other, especially in the macro-category of root modality, was not always straightforward. Nevertheless, the context was useful in sorting out the semantics of the modal. For example, context helped distinguish cases in which *must* was used to convey dynamic and not deontic meanings, as in (14). Since the deontic source is external and the necessity is linked to some generic regulations/circumstances, examples in (14) have been annotated as dynamic. Indeed, the possibility of converting (14) into the passive (i.e. *the code must be entered*) shows that “there is no overt agent whom the speaker can be said to be trying to influence” (Coates 1983: 36).

(14) PC Game Supply - I've heard about it before but didn't try them until now. Set up a new account there, remember **must** use real SG mobile phone number cos for the first transaction they will SMS you a verification code, which you **must** enter for your purchase to proceed. (HWZC, posted by: *PierceLee*, May 11, 2016, my emphasis)

While *must*, *have to*, *have got to*, *got to*, and *gotta* have been described statistically and semantically, *need to* has been counted just in terms of frequency compared to the other modals. A more detailed statistical modelling of *need to* is left for future research.

5. Results

5.1 RQ1: Does the modal system of necessity in SgE replicate that of Mandarin Chinese?

As mentioned above, Bao (2010) claims that the use of the modal verb *must* in SgE is directly influenced by the particle *bixū* in Mandarin. Mandarin has indeed
displaced the other Chinese dialects as the most used Chinese dialect at home (Siemund, Schulz, and Schweinberger 2014; Leimgruber, Siemund, and Terassa 2018), and it is assumed that all the other Chinese dialects spoken in Singapore share the same morphosyntactic features with Mandarin (Bao 2015: 20).

As Hansen (2018) claims, however, *bìxū* (必须) is not the only deontic particle in Mandarin. Xūyào (需要) and děi/biděi (得/必得) have, in fact, meanings related to necessity and deontic modality. Hansen considers xūyào an equivalent to English *need* and *need to*. This may indeed express both *need* as a lexical verb followed by a NP and *need to* as an auxiliary followed by a VP, as shown in (15) and (16) (Hansen 2018: 217, my emphasis). This makes xūyào and *need (to)* very similar syntactically and semantically.

(15) wǒmen xūyào fēijī.
we *need* airplane
‘we *need* airplanes’.

(16) wǒmen xūyào jiàshǐ fēijī.
we *need* pilot airplane
‘we *need to* pilot airplanes’.

Děi is more frequently used as an auxiliary verb and in less formal situations (Wiedenhof 2015: 170; Hansen 2018). Bìxū and děi are in fact different in terms of strength and context of use. First, bìxū expresses strong obligation or “high modulation”, while děi expresses “median obligation” (cf. Halliday and McDonald 2004: 339 for the use of these terms). Second, bìxū is preferred in formal texts, such as written legal texts. This would make the use of bìxū similar to the use of *must* in BrE today (cf. Ross and Sheng Ma 2006: 61), and děi more similar to *have to*, seen as the modal marker with a lighter form of obligation. Table 2 summarises the main features of the three modal markers, following Hansen’s (2018) intuitions.

<table><caption>**Table 2.** Equivalence of modal markers in Mandarin and English</caption><thead><tr><th>Modal marker in<br>Mandarin</th><th>Preferred<br>channel</th><th>Level of formality</th><th>Closest equivalent<br>in English</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>bìxū (必须)</td><td>written</td><td>formal</td><td>must</td></tr><tr><td>xūyào (需要)</td><td>written/spoken</td><td>formal/informal</td><td>need (to)</td></tr><tr><td>děi/bìděi (得/必得)</td><td>Spoken</td><td>informal</td><td>have to</td></tr></tbody></table>

If we assumed that in contact situations lexical or grammatical features from the lexifier language (i.e. English) may acquire new grammatical and lexical meanings
from the equivalent features in the substratum (Bao 2015: 163), English *must* would more easily converge on Mandarin *bixū, need (to)* on xūyào, and *have to* on děi (*biděi*), as also suggested by Hansen (2018).

Whereas this equivalence seems to be less problematic, as we will see, for both *need (to)* and *have to*, a more fine-grained analysis is needed for *must*, which is claimed to share the same semantic features as *bixū* (Bao 2010). The corpus analysis conducted on the different corpora mentioned above shows that the use of *must* in SgE is generally quite productive, compared to BrE, where *must* has declined sharply in the 20th century (Leech 2013: 100–101). The results are illustrated in Figures 1 and 2.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1.** Frequency of *must* in the corpora (normalised to 10,000 words)</figcaption></figure>

Figure 1 shows the number of total occurrences of the verb *must*. *Must* was quite productive in both the ICE-SIN and *The Flowerpod Corpus*. However, its frequency appears to recede in HWZC and in *The Salary Corpus*, both being corpora collecting data from the 2010s up to 2021. From 9.9 occurrences per 10,000 words in ICE-SIN to 3.5 in *The Salary Corpus*, *must* appears to decrease in popularity, next to other semi-modal markers of necessity (see Section 4.3).
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 2.** Semantic functions of *must*<fnref n="4" /></figcaption></figure>

Figure 2 shows the use of *must* in the different semantic categories which have been discussed above: dynamic, deontic, and epistemic. Epistemic modality seems to be generally most productive in BrE data, where it represents almost 50 per cent of its uses. Interestingly enough, dynamic uses, such as (17) and (18), appear to be quite productive in the four Singaporean corpora, differently from ICE-GB where they do not reach 13 per cent of total uses.

(17) Manuka Honey suppose to eat like tat... if dissolve in water, the nutrient will be lesser.. and water **must** be room temperature if u wan to dissolve in water. (*The Flowerpod Corpus*, posted by: *karen2101*, May 22, 2007, my emphasis)

(18) I'm still quite not clear about it. Does my TV **must** have Android TV OS build in to use it? (HWZC, posted by: *kelvinti*, October 3, 2020, my emphasis)

If we associate *must* to bìxū, as Bao (2010) claims, and *have to* to děi, it is not clear why SgE *must* is especially used with dynamic meanings, i.e. with a “median” kind of necessity, where the obligation is not strong. Median obligation is in fact typical of děi and not bìxū. Additionally, if *must* did converge on bìxū, a particle that in Mandarin is used for legal and written texts, it is not clear why this tends to be so common in the analysed corpora, all being informal in style. The texts analysed for ICE-SIN are all spoken transcriptions – mostly informal – and the remaining three corpora are collections of blog chats exchanged in highly informal settings.

<footnote n="4">⁴ For the sake of clarity, in Figure 2 and in Figures 4, 5, and 6, 100 per cent corresponds to the total number of occurrences of the discussed modal or semi-modal in each corpus.</footnote>
Another point that would suggest that Bao’s convergence-to-substratum
theory cannot explain completely the semantics of *must* in SgE is the reason why
epistemic uses of *must*, such as (19) and (20), are still produced in SgE, even if
less frequently than in BrE data. As Bao claims himself, *bixū* has never
grammaticalised to epistemic uses and is exclusively a deontic particle. As a
consequence, it is not clear why *must* is still produced epistemically. As shown in
Figure 2, from the 1990s to 2021, epistemic uses have not decreased but appear to
have even slightly increased in frequency.

(19) **I must** have been mistaken then. Sorry abt that. (HWZC, posted by: *finale1*,
July 9, 2016, my emphasis)

(20) Price on Lazada just went up again ...... **must** be quite in demand for prices to keep increasing and always OOS. (HWZC, posted by: *koenig168*, May 10, 2018, my emphasis)

All these reasons drive us to test whether a diachronic explanation could account
for the frequent non-epistemic uses of *must* in SgE today. This will be discussed
in RQ2.

5.2 RQ2: Can Ziegeler's (2014) theory explain the relatively frequent non-epistemic use of *must* in SgE today?

A diachronic investigation of *must* needs to be carried out to test the contact-
grammaticalisation theories. Gregersen (2020) studies the historical path of
grammaticalisation of *motan* – the ancestor of modern *must* – by analysing a rich
and heterogeneous selection of corpora from Old English (OE, 800–1100) and
Middle English (ME, 1100–1500) times. Differently from the previous literature
on the topic, he claims that after the early use of *motan* with a permission meaning
in OE, the necessity emerged out of contexts where *must* had dynamic uses. From
dynamic uses of possibility typical of OE, *motan* switched to dynamic uses of
necessity in early ME times, which then further grammaticalised to deontic uses
of necessity. The grammaticalisation path of *motan/must* used with a necessity
meaning, suggested by Gregersen, would have then followed the path dynamic >
deontic > epistemic. An example of dynamic necessity is shown in (21). The earl
is driven by the circumstances to take off his shoes by himself because he has sent
his servants away. It is therefore not a matter of obligation or necessity imposed
by some other deontic source.

(21) Me schon I *mot* me self ofdrawe
Ase y neuer 3et ne dede.
(After all the servants have left:) 'My shoes I [sc. the earl] **must** take off myself, as I have never done before'. (Gregersen 2020: 281, Sir Beues of Hamtoun, ca. 1330, Burnley and Wiggins 2005, my emphasis)<fnref n="5" />

Gregersen (2020: 287) argues that from these dynamic uses, where the circumstances lie at the origins of the necessity, deontic meanings emerged by the end of the Late Middle English period (LME, 1350–1500), as in (22) where the necessity is not related to circumstances, but is instead a case of direct obligation imposed by a monastic rule to all members in good health.<fnref n="6" />

(22) Every brother and suster þat hathe ther helthe, of what countre or place that so euer they be, yf they may goodly, **must** here masse euery day
‘Every brother and sister who is in good health, no matter which country or place they come from, if they are properly able to, **must** attend mass every day’. (Gregersen 2020: 287, 3rd Order of St Francis, ca. 1500, Chambers and Seton 1914, my emphasis)

The semantic annotation of *must* in the SgE data has shown that dynamic uses are quite productive, differently from BrE data, where these uses appear to be less frequent, representing only 12.94 per cent (cf. Figure 2). Starting from Gregersen, if we assumed that dynamic uses correspond to a less grammaticalised stage of *must*, it could be argued that in SgE this modal verb is now replicating an older use in the history of its lexifier. This would entail that *must* is the result of a process of replica grammaticalisation as recapitulation (Ziegeler 2014), and that it is less grammaticalised, as claimed by Loureiro-Porto (2019), compared to BrE. The coincidence with the past dynamic uses of *motan* in the history of the English language is in fact surprising, as not justifiable through an adstratum influence. If New Englishes are new varieties of an older language, “there is no reason why they should not follow in their early development similar directions to those of their predecessors” (Ziegeler 2014: 132).

Furthermore, the corpus analysis suggests that SgE *must* is not fossilised, but is still grammaticalising. Comparing ICE-SIN (from the 1990s) with HWZC (from the 2010s up to February 2021), dynamic uses are slightly declining, giving space to deontic and epistemic uses. If *must* was simply converging to *bixū*, a particle that has never grammaticalised to epistemic uses, one would expect a gradual

<footnote n="5">⁵ The glosses for (21) and (22) are slightly adapted from Gregersen (2020).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Gregersen (2020) distinguishes three types of deontic necessity: “obligation”, “deontic moral”, and “mandative”, all attested in LME. This distinction is built on Nuyts, Byloo, and Diepeveen (2010) and Byloo and Nuyts (2014). In the present corpus analysis, this differentiation has not been made, the category “deontic” grouping the three types.</footnote>
decrease of epistemic uses. This does not seem to be the case here: epistemic uses
are still productive and seem to increase their frequency in the most recent corpora
compared to ICE-SIN.

5.3 RQ3: What is the role and use of the other necessity modals in SgE compared to BrE?

<table><caption>**Table 3.** Raw tokens of the necessity modals in the five corpora</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>must</th><th>have to</th><th>(have) got to</th><th>gotta</th><th>need to</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>ICE-GB</td><td>201</td><td>268</td><td>149</td><td>2</td><td>144</td></tr><tr><td>ICE-SIN</td><td>358</td><td>488</td><td>107</td><td>6</td><td>192</td></tr><tr><td>The Flowerpod Corpus</td><td>377</td><td>360</td><td>46</td><td>65</td><td>488</td></tr><tr><td>HWZC</td><td>188</td><td>282</td><td>19</td><td>21</td><td>723</td></tr><tr><td>The Salary Corpus</td><td>167</td><td>317</td><td>19</td><td>15</td><td>469</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 3.** Normalised frequency per 10,000 words of necessity modals in the studied corpora</figcaption></figure>

Table 3 shows the frequency in raw tokens of the analysed modals in the five corpora. Considering the differences in word count of the corpora (cf. Table 1), its distribution has been normalised per 10,000 words in Figure 3, in order to illustrate the modal distribution from the 1990s to 2021.

Occurrences of *have to* have been counted excluding all those contexts where it is used in non-finite forms and negative contexts, as explained in Section 4. Looking at the results of the annotations in the five corpora, dynamic and deontic
uses tend to be steady over the years, with dynamic uses becoming proportionally more frequent than deontic ones, as shown in Figure 4.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 4.** Semantic functions of *have to*</figcaption></figure>

If we assume that dynamic and deontic uses correspond respectively to Depraetere and Verhulst's (2008) "discourse-external" and "discourse-internal" uses, our results go in line with their findings that *have to* in BrE is used for both. SgE seems to have a similar distribution. If we look at the raw frequency of use of this semi-modal (Figure 3), its use over the years seems to stay constant, next to the rapid increase of use of *need to*, and the slight decline of *must*.

A comparison between *have to* and *must* in SgE data shows that their use is not exactly identical. First, dynamic uses seem to decrease for *must* (see Figure 2), but not for *have to*. Second, *must* in both SgE and BrE data remains the most common choice to express epistemic modality in the domain of necessity. This is indeed not the case for *have to*, as its epistemic use is evidently marginal in both the analysed varieties.

(*Have* *got to* is used more in the British corpus than in the SgE corpora (136 raw occurrences of *have got to* and 13 of *got to* were found in ICE-GB). 79.19 per cent of its uses are deontic, so they express strong necessity. This supports Leech's (2014: 148–149) claim that *have got to* (and *have to*) are more face-threatening than *need to*, being typical of “strong obligation statements”.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 5.** Semantic functions of (*have*) *got to*</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.** Semantic functions of *gotta*</figcaption></figure>

In the SgE data, the use of *got to*, and especially *have got to*, appears to be less popular than other necessity modals. HWZC had no examples of *have got to*, as the normalised 3.8 occurrences shown in Figure 3 are all occurrences of *got to*. The numbers suggest, then, a possible decline of this form. Nevertheless, as Figure 5 shows, the SgE corpora have more frequent uses of this semi-modal in epistemic contexts (23), thus suggesting a possible case of accelerated grammaticalisation.

(23) Hands down, this **has got to** be one of the coolest looking nerf blasters ever.
*(The Flowerpod Corpus, posted by: xrebirthx, December 27, 2008, my emphasis)*

Loureiro-Porto (2019: 128) also finds this feature in SgE, pointing out that “its possibility of expressing epistemic meanings (1.2 per cent) [is] something that is only recorded in BrE (1.7 per cent) and Hong Kong English (HKE) (15.8 per cent)”, but not in the other World Englishes she analyses. Hence, this makes SgE very advanced in this situation.

Interestingly enough, whereas *gotta*, the reduced counterpart of *got to*, appears only 0.1 times per 10,000 words in ICE-GB, and 0.2 times in ICE-SIN, the three blog corpora have more numerous occurrences. In *The Flowerpod Corpus*, 1.1 occurrences of *gotta* per 10,000 words were found, 0.4 in HWZC, and 0.3 in *The Salary Corpus*.<fnref n="7" /> If we assume that *gotta* is the more grammaticalised counterpart of (*have*) *got to* (Loureiro-Porto 2019: 119), being the product of a phenomenon of phonological reduction (Lehman 1985; Heine 1993), its higher relative frequency in the SgE corpora could support the hypothesis of its accelerated grammaticalisation rate.<fnref n="8" /> Another possible explanation could be a case of

<footnote n="7">⁷ As noted by an anonymous reviewer, in the case of the ICE corpus, transcriptions of spoken data may be the result of arbitrary decisions, e.g. *gotta* as the spelling convention for phonetically reduced *got to*. As a result, “caution is required in interpreting orthographic evidence as phonological change” (Krug and Schützler 2015: 383).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Since ICE-GB was compiled in the 1990s, it is not excluded that similar results can be obtained in more contemporary British data. Leech (2013) carries out some investigations</footnote>
"Americanization", i.e. the gradual shift to American English (AmE) norms, as a result of AmE norms taking the lead with BrE following it more slowly (Leech et al. 2009: 253–254). *Gotta* used epistemically has in fact been found to be more popular in Northern American dialects than in BrE (Tagliamonte and D'Arcy 2007). Figure 6 shows that *gotta* may appear with deontic (24), dynamic (25), and epistemic (26) meanings, with the former being the most common.

(24) I think most importantly, *u gotta* consider the jobscope n opportunites. coz same title in diff company means diff things. (*The Flowerpod Corpus*, posted by: booey, July 26, 2008, my emphasis)

(25) Speaker B: you have to try finish it
Speaker A: No but the first time round you gotta heat it up
Speaker B: Oh just put in here lor
Speaker A: Microwave lah. (ICE-SIN: s1a-064, my emphasis)

(26) You gotta be kidding me!?!?... You may know the models and technical specs, but do you actually know their system well? (*The Flowerpod Corpus*, posted by: genekoh, November 16, 2007, my emphasis)

Further analyses need to be carried out to see whether the relative popularity of *gotta* and its epistemic use could be both considered cases of Americanization.<fnref n="9" />

Finally, the sharp increase of *need to* from the 1990s to the 2010s is quite surprising and seems to co-occur with a parallel decline of *must* (see Figure 3). A possible reason behind this high frequency could be found in the main adstrate language – Mandarin. As Hansen (2018) claims, in Mandarin the main verb or auxiliary xūyào has got the same syntactic and semantic features as the verb *need* (*to*) in English, as it can both be a full verb having an object or an auxiliary followed by a verb. This could lead to an easy convergence-to-substratum, using Bao’s (2010) definition of the process. In other words, it is likely for *need to* to converge on a similar structure in Mandarin as the similarity between syntactical and semantic features make the process much simpler (than *must* and bìxū, for instance). Hansen (2018: 310) agrees on this explanation, also citing a similar case in HKE where *need to* would similarly converge on its adstrate language, Cantonese. Loureiro-Porto (2019: 128) also argues that the higher use of *need to*

on more modern American and British data acknowledging the high grammaticalisation rates of semi modals in both BrE and AmE.

<footnote n="9">⁹ As noted by an anonymous reviewer, it would be interesting to include AmE data into the overall analysis, in order to compare SgE and AmE modal distributions. However interesting this comparison is for future research, it is not explored in this paper as the main focus was a comparison with BrE, the historical ancestor of SgE.</footnote>
over modal *need* makes SgE very advanced compared to other Asian English varieties.

## 6. Discussion

In the previous section, three different research questions have served the purpose of shedding some light on the role that Mandarin and the lexifier language have in the production of modality of necessity in SgE. RQ1 showed that the substratist theory is insufficient to explain alone the semantic features of *must* in SgE.<fnref n="10" /> Mandarin does not seem to account for the use of *must* in informal situations and with a dynamic meaning. A convergence on Mandarin would entail that *must* in the recipient language, i.e. SgE, would share at least the main semantic features with Mandarin itself. However, the corpus analysis has shown that this is not the case. SgE *must* is used differently from *bìxū* in the adstrate language, which Bao claimed to be its model in the convergence-to-substratum process. Also, epistemic occurrences of *must* have been found despite the impossible use of *bìxū* epistemically.

The contact-grammaticalisation theories offer an interesting alternative to account for the limitations of the substratist theory, and to justify the unusually frequent dynamic uses of *must* in SgE data. It has been shown that these uses do not seem to be common in the ICE-GB data, where dynamic or circumstantial necessity is instead typical of the semi-modal *have to*. As Collins (2009: 40) claims, dynamic *must* is only “a minor category”, being more commonly expressed instead by *have to* (Collins 2009: 62). The dynamic use of *must* in the SgE corpora makes this modal verb closer to the inner-circle use of *have to*, seen as the semi-modal of necessity conveying a more objective meaning with a deontic source external to the speaker (cf. Palmer 1990; Perkins 1993; Collins 2009). Examining the diachronic path of development of *must* in the history of the English language, the frequent use of dynamic *must* today seems to correspond to an historical use of *motan* in Early Middle English times when *must* had not yet grammaticalised to deontic and epistemic meanings. This form of correspondence

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ It needs to be pointed out that Bao’s (2010) convergence-to-substratum remains a precious framework set to explain different features in the heterogenous linguistic pool of SgE. Moreover, it is not excluded that this model also plays a role in the development of SgE modal verbs, as seen with the case of *need to*. His 2010 study was, however, conditioned by more restrictive corpus material, as it was based on ICE-GB and ICE-SIN (private dialogue sub-corpora) only.</footnote>
is in line with Ziegeler's finding related to the modal verb *will* in SgE. The latter has been found to be used with a habitual meaning, almost disappeared in contemporary BrE, but quite productive in Old English times. This interesting coincidence between contemporary uses in the recipient language with the historical uses in BrE, seen as the model language in Ziegeler's theories, would correspond to a matching case of replica grammaticalisation as recapitulation. *Must* in SgE could then be at an earlier stage of grammaticalisation, as

> new language varieties are likely to reproduce the same processes as those found in creoles, and the contact language situation is typically represented by grammaticalising forms in their early stages of development. (Ziegeler 2014: 124)

The slight increase of epistemic uses over the years, shown in Figure 2, suggests that *must* is still grammaticalising. It cannot be excluded, though, that at some point, there will be a case of renewal, i.e. the progressive replacement of existing meanings with new original forms (cf. Meillet 1915, 1958; Hopper and Traugott 2003). This could lead to the ultimate extinction of this modal verb, at least in its less grammaticalised non-epistemic use, and to a replacement with other semi-modals of necessity (e.g. *have to* and *need to*). The rise of semi-modals and parallel decline of core modals, already observed in inner-circle varieties (Collins 2009), has indeed been discussed in Hansen (2018). Through some apparent-time investigations, she claims that outer-circle varieties are following the same trend as English-as-a-native-language varieties.

RQ3 showed that not every modal verb of necessity is less grammaticalised in SgE than in BrE. *Have to* appears to have the same degree of grammaticalisation in both the varieties, being especially used to convey dynamic necessity. This is in line with what is claimed by Loureiro-Porto (2019), who finds that although the epistemic meaning of *have to* is rarer in SgE than in BrE, the grammaticalisation stage of this semi-modal is similar in the two varieties as well as in other post-colonial varieties such as HKE, Indian English, and Philippine English. *Have to*, then, seems to be the most common option to express median obligation, following the same semantic attributes of its equivalent in Mandarin, i.e. *děi*, as shown in RQ1.

Interestingly enough, (*have* *got to* appears to be declining in frequency over the years, thus confirming Collins' (2009: 72) claim that *have got to* is less used than *have to* and *must* in contemporary English. However, despite the few examples found in the Singaporean corpora, as Figure 5 illustrates, it is more often used epistemically than in BrE. This could suggest a possible case of accelerated
grammaticalisation, which also seems to be validated by the high frequency of
epistemic *gotta* – the corresponding phonetically eroded, and then more
grammaticalised form (Hopper and Traugott 2003). This would make SgE quite
progressive in the use of this semi-modal. Another explanation could be a case of
Americanization, as mentioned earlier.

*Need to* seems to be instead a good example of convergence on the adstrate, i.e. Mandarin. The corpora show that its use is increasing considerably, next to a possible decline of *must*. From 5.6 occurrences per 10,000 words of this verb in ICE-SIN – the oldest Singaporean corpus of the study – HWZC and *The Salary Corpus* present respectively 13.9 and 9.7 occurrences of *need to*. As mentioned before, the semantic and syntactic similarities with *xūyào* are probably the reason behind its over-production, as also mentioned by Hansen (2018: 218). Nevertheless, more research is needed to confirm these intuitions. Some semantic analyses on the use of *need to* are also needed to integrate van der Auwera, Noël, and De Wit’s (2012) study on the polarity of *need* in Asian Englishes compared to BrE and AmE.

In sum, the necessity paradigm shows a very complex situation where different phenomena come into action. Cases of transfer from the substrate/adstrate languages and phenomena of contact-grammaticalisation seem to both have a role to play in these contact situations, *need to* and *must* being respectively the two modal markers that seem to be the best products of these two processes.

7. Summary and conclusions

While the substrate/adstrate languages influence SgE in its modality, this paper
has attempted to find which other factors influence some non-standard behaviour
of necessity modals. Justifying the high frequency of root *must* only in terms of
convergence-to-substratum would not be enough to explain some semantic
properties of *must* in SgE. It has been shown that Mandarin *bīxū* is especially used
for deontic modality and in formal written texts. This does not seem to be
consistent with the frequent use of *must* in SgE in spoken or informal interactions
and with weak (or dynamic) modality of necessity. Furthermore, the epistemic
uses of *must* in SgE today cannot find an ontological explanation with such a
theory.

As a result, it has been pointed out that Ziegeler's (2014) replica
grammaticalisation theory might account for the frequent use of non-epistemic
must in Singapore today. Indeed, by looking at the history of necessity *must* from Old English to present times, dynamic uses seem to have preceded deontic and obligation uses in Middle English times. This would correspond to today's situation in Singapore. The necessity modal *must* could then be just in a less grammaticalised stage, in its way of development. A slight increase of epistemic *must* in the diachronic corpora could support such a theory as shown before.

Finally, other semi-modals have been analysed. The most striking feature seems to be the sharp rise of *need to* alongside the possible decline of other forms, e.g. *must*. The high frequency of *need to* has been explained through a convergence-to-substratum process, taking Bao's (2010) definition, as *need to* would be converging with a syntactically and semantically similar verb in Mandarin. The similarities between *need to* and *xūyào*, which can be both a full transitive verb and an auxiliary followed by another verb, would make the convergence an easy and immediate process for SgE speakers. The analysis of the necessity paradigm has therefore sketched a complex scenario where cases of contact-grammaticalisation, convergence on the adstratum, and convergence on AmE norms appear to all have a role in the modal ecology of SgE.

Last but not least, much more research is certainly needed to support this hypothesis. The use of *need to* also deserves more attention, especially in terms of its semantic functions which have not been studied here. Finally, a comparison with other outer-circle varieties, such as HKE, would be interesting. In HKE, as Hansen (2018) shows, root *must* is also very frequent. General comparisons with other varieties will allow us to provide more detailed analyses on how contact-grammaticalisation and substrate influences may play a leading role in the variation of modality in contact situations.

**Funding information**

This work was partially supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program "Investissements d'Avenir" (ANR-10-LABX-0083 - Labex EFL). Work on this paper was also financed by Région Île de France and the Paris-National University of Singapore PhD Mobility Grant (2021-01-PHD/UP-NUS/ANR-18-IDEX-0001).

**Acknowledgements**

Acknowledgements are owed to the audience at the *International Society for the Linguistics of English* 6th Conference, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, June 2-5, 2021,
and at the 54th Annual Meeting of the *Societas Linguistica Europaea*, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, August 30 – September 3, 2021, at which the first ideas for this paper were presented. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Marianne Hundt for their precious comments. Special thanks go to Bao Zhiming, Agnès Celle, and Debra Ziegeler for their constant support.

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Address for correspondence:

Carmelo Alessandro Basile
CLILLAC-ARP, Études Anglophones
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
8, Avenue de Saint Mandé 75012
France
alessandro.basile@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr