The double modal construction in English world wide

Abstract The dual foci of the present study of double modals are their semantic characteristics and their distribution across regional varieties of English world wide. Tokens were extracted from GloWbE:Blogs, a database whose great size and informal tenor facilitated the investigation of this low‐frequency non‐standard feature. Double modals were found to be more common in the New Englishes of the ‘Outer Circle’ than in the ‘Inner Circle’ varieties, a finding ascribed to such factors as evolutionary status, prescriptivism and simplification. Substrate influence is suggested to be in operation for the strong frequencies for Bangladeshi English and Hong Kong English. Combinatorial preferences diverged across the two Circles: that for will can in the Outer Circle versus would could in the Inner Circle can be claimed to reflect general differences in epistemicity, with the tendency for epistemic modals in double modals to be more frequent than root modals—especially in first position—noted to be stronger in the Inner Circle.