One well-investigated recent change in English that has been linked to democratization is the ongoing change in the modal domain, which is characterized by a decline of some of the core modals (such as may, might, must) and a rise of the so-called semi-modals (such as be able to, have to, have got to) (cf. Leech, 2003; Mair and Leech, 2006; Leech, 2013). This process is advanced to different degrees in different varieties of English (cf. Collins, 2009a/b). Although a correlation between a society's decreasing attention to social hierarchies and changes in the use of markers of modality is intuitively convincing, there is still a lack of empirical studies linking the two phenomena.

The present paper represents a first step to fill this gap by combining corpus-based and variational pragmatic methodology. Focusing on three varieties of English (British, American and Indian English), we first investigate the frequency differences in the use of the core modals in GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web-Based English). This traditional corpus-linguistic approach is supplemented by the use of discourse completion tasks (DCTs) to collect instances of requests, a speech act in which deontic modals are likely to be used. By collecting data in the respective varieties from 172 speakers belonging to a younger and an older group, we can analyze synchronic variation as well as diachronic change based on apparent-time data.

The results confirm previous findings on the use of modals in different varieties of English to a large extent. Furthermore, we found the core modals’ different rates of decline to be mirrored broadly in their different frequencies of occurrence in the DCT. Interesting differences between the two L1 varieties and the L2 variety investigated are brought to light.

已链接到民主化英语的一种公考察近期的变化是模式域，它的特点是一些核心情态动词（如降幅不断变化的5月，威力，必须）和所谓的上升所谓的半模态（例如能够，必须，必须）（参见Leech，2003； Mair和Leech，2006； Leech，2013）。在英语的不同变体中，这一过程得到了不同程度的发展（参见Collins，2009a / b）。尽管一个社会对社会等级制度的关注度下降与使用情态标记的变化之间的关联在直觉上令人信服，但仍然缺乏将这两种现象联系起来的经验研究。

本论文代表了通过结合基于语料库和变异语用学方法论来填补这一空白的第一步。我们着眼于三种英语（英国，美国和印度英语），我们首先研究GloWbE（基于全球网络的英语公司）中核心模态使用中的频率差异。通过使用话语完成任务（DCT）来收集请求的实例，从而补充了这种传统的语料库语言方法，这是一种可能使用言语情态的言语行为。通过从172个年龄较小和较大年龄组的说话者中收集各个类别的数据，我们可以基于视时数据分析同步变化和历时变化。

结果在很大程度上证实了以前在不同的英语品种中使用情态模式的发现。此外，我们发现核心模态的不同下降率在DCT中的不同发生频率上可以大致反映出来。揭示了两个L1品种和L2品种之间有趣的差异。