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Volume 11, Issue 2
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Abstract

Abstract

When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receive an appropriate interpretation from this context, thus being saturated by it. Such a context may also short-circuit illocutionary and other pragmatic aspects of interpretation. We here extract from the British National Corpus over 500 internally highly collocating and high-frequency lexical n-grams up to 5 words containing , , , and/or . These contexts-as-constructions go some way toward allowing us to group these four necessity modals into clusters with similar semantic and pragmatic properties and to determine which of them is semantico-pragmatically most unlike the others. It appears that and cluster most closely together thanks to their shared environments (e.g., , expressing contingent, mitigated necessity), while has the largest share of unique n-grams (e.g., rhetorical , used as a defiant self-exhortation).

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2019-11-07
2023-06-03

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The necessity modals have to, must, need to, and should
Constructions and Frames 11, 220 (2019); https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00029.cap
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): hierarchical clustering analysis; illocutionary force; intersubjectivity; lexically restricted saturation; mutual information; n-grams; necessity modals; short-circuiting

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