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‘You’ve got to sort of eh hoy the Geordie out’: modals of obligation and necessity in fifty years of Tyneside English1

This article examines the use of the semi-modals have to, have got to and need to in the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE), a corpus of spoken Northeastern English dating from the late 1960s to the present day. It will be shown that the semi-modals have, in many contexts, replaced the historically older must as markers of obligation and necessity in this variety. Moreover, the two most frequent variants in the corpus, have to and have got to, will be examined in the light of current theories of grammaticalisation. Internal and external constraints, which have been shown in the literature on root modality to have played an important role in the distribution of variants in other regional varieties of British and North American English, will be tested in DECTE. The article will also examine the rise of need to in this northeastern variety, as the most recent addition to the group of variants marking obligation and necessity.