Advice-Giving in Spoken English: A Targeted Study of Modality Shifts in One Speech Act

Focusing specifically on the speech act of advice, the present study investigates the role of democratization, or the flattening of social hierarchies, in the use and development of modal verbs in Present-Day spoken British English. In contrast to previous research, which so far has investigated English modality across a variety of speech acts, this study provides a more controlled environment for testing the democratization hypothesis through its focus on modality in only one speech act. Advice is an appropriate testbed because of its sensitive nature. Based on spoken diachronic data from the London–Lund Corpora, the results show a shift toward not only more equal but also more informal advice-giving strategies, as evidenced by an increase in need to and can , and in constructions involving possibility modals with the inclusive we , and a decrease in must , have got to , might , and would . While by and large the results mirror those of earlier studies, there are also some differences that call for more detailed investigations of the shifts and changes in English modality in specific speech act contexts.