Understanding Linguistics in World Englishes throughout Covid-19: Modal Verbs

Abstract

[eng] This corpus-based study focuses on the nine English central modal verbs (can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would) from the 20 English-speaking countries of the Coronavirus Corpus. A wide variety of databases are now available to researchers in the Coronavirus Corpus, which allows for the expploration of large datasets of varieties of English all over the globe. Because research on modal verbs throughout the period of Covid-19 is limited, this study investigates the frequency and distribution of the nine core modals across the 15-month period (from January 2020 to March 2021), a period of imposing restrictions which certainly make an impact in society and communication. Rather than focusing on the traditional difference between inner and outer-circle varieties (as done, for example, by Collins 2009), I have classified countries into two groups, based on the anti-Covid-19 policy adopted, namely mitigation or suppression. As a result, the distribution of modal verbs across the different months differ greatly. The results suggest that the new imposing social restrictions on countries correlates pretty neatly with a higher frequency of the nine core modals.