6. Modal Contractions in MICASE: The case of will/’ll

Authors: Sara Pilon and John Swales
Date: March 2004
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Kibbitzer 6

Modal contractions in MICASE: The case of will/’ll
Sara Pilon and John M. Swales

First a little
Then a lottle
—The Catsup Bottle (Ogden Nash)

Modal contractions are known to be common in conversation, but what is the situation in academic speech? Here we present, as a preliminary investigation, some data for a single modal, that of will and its standard contraction, ’ll. In the frequency data that follows, we have ignored situations where contractions cannot occur, as in initial will in interrogatives or in the phrase if you will (meaning “if you like”). Another constraint derives from the software currently available: The MICASE website is excellent for speaker attributes but it can only handle final wild cards (i.e. it cannot cope with a structure like “*’ll”); on the other hand, Wordsmith Tools can easily deal with such strings, but it provides no easily-extractable information on speaker attributes. For these reasons, this study will be partly restricted to a comparison of I will and I’ll; however, these constitute two of the commonest occurrences will and ‘ll in the database (I will makes up 247 of the 2444 occurrences of will, and I’ll makes up 1265 of the 3442 occurrences of ‘ll).

Of the three speaker attributes initially examined in this study (gender, age, and native speaker status), the first showed that there were no significant differences between the choice of will versus “ll by male or female speakers. Further, the data for non-native speakers is really too sparse to allow any firm conclusions to be drawn. On the other hand, the age variable is quite interesting. There are four different age groups in the MICASE database: 17-23, 24-30, 31-50, and 51 and over. In all age groups, the contracted form is used more often, but the difference lies in how much more often it is used. The general trend is that as age increases, so does the use of the full form of I will. The only exception is the slight increase in the use of I’ll in the 24-30 age group. On this evidence, it looks as if younger people are using contractions much more than older people (about 22% more). Table 1 shows the number of times I will and I’ll is said by each age division and also the percentage each is used.

TABLE 1:

Age	I will	(%) I will is used	I’ll	(%) I’ll is used
17-23	36	9.0%	363	91.0%
24-30	9	4.3%	200	95.7%
31-50	122	22.3%	424	77.7%
51 and over	79	27.0%	214	73.0%

GRAPH 1: As age increases, the yellow bar gets higher and the green bar gets lower, illustrating that as age increases, the tendency to use contractions decreases.

Obviously, this difference among age groups might be attributed to the hypothesis that older people are simply more likely to adopt a more formal speaking style. However, it is at least as probable that speaker role is a more decisive factor. It is more likely that a person in the 17-23 age group is a student speaking in a less formal event, such as a study group, and that a person in the 51 and older group is a professor speaking in a large lecture or colloquium. For this reason, it may not just be the age of a person that determines these apparent differences among the groups, but also the roles that the people in each age group typically fill.

In fact, the type of speech event and discourse mode has a considerable effect on the use of will and ‘ll. In the MICASE data, there are 16 different speech event types and four different discourse modes. Here is the data for all occurrences of will and ’ll:

GRAPH 2: As the graph progresses from left to right, the frequency of will increases, and ’ll decreases

Presumably, the differences in contraction use among the different speech events have to do with both the formality of the event and the pace at which the speech is given. A person delivering a colloquium (collo) or large lecture (larg) is most likely speaking much more formally than a person in a tutorial (tutor) or service encounter (servi). Since using the full form of a verb is the norm for formal academic writing, the same is likely true for more formal academic speech events, especially when these are scripted or partly scripted in advance. In addition to prior preparation, these more formal speech events can be expected to be delivered at a slower pace and/or with greater emphasis than other, less ones, thus predisposing the full rather than the contracted form.

In addition to the speech event type, the primary discourse mode of the speech event has an influence on how often will and ‘ll are used. As expected, of the four discourse modes, monologic or lecture mode has the highest frequency of will, while interactional or dialogue mode has the highest frequency of ‘ll. Graph 3 summarizes these results.

GRAPH 3: Interactional/dialogue mode has the greatest percentage of ‘ll; panel has the next highest percent, followed by mixed; monologic/lecture mode has the least percentage of ‘ll.

Finally, there is pretty strong evidence that the subject in front of the modal affects whether or not the modal is contracted in the MICASE data. It seems that monosyllabic high frequency subjects are more likely to trigger contractions than longer less common ones. As the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English observes "pronoun subjects generally favor the occurrence of contractions, while full noun phrase subjects generally do not,” (Biber et al., 1999). In fact, the most common instances of ‘ll in the MICASE data are I’ll (1265), we’ll (857), you’ll (561), it’ll (278), and they’ll (181). Table 2 shows some of the most and least common words that are followed by will or ‘ll.

TABLE 2:

Base word	will	% will is used	‘ll	% ‘ll is used
we	116	11.9%	857	88.1%
I	247	17.8%	1265	82.2%
you	232	41.3%	561	70.7%
polymerase	4	66.7%	2	33.3%
things	7	77.8%	2	22.2%
people	34	91.9%	3	8.1%

As these results indicate, words that occur more often with will are more likely to take the contracted form. This makes sense because people seem to have a tendency to shorten things they say often. Another factor that could influence whether ‘ll or will is used is the ease with which the contracted combination can be pronounced, as in the difficult case of the “double l” in people’ll There are, however, a few occurrences of these hard-to-pronounce words in the MICASE data. For example:

1. so if Y goes up R’ll have to go up
2. it will overpredict how many people’ll want to leave.
3. now s-RNA polymerase’ll stop after the series of
4. E’ll be two, and my dollar’ll buy, half a pound

While interesting contractions like these do occur in the database, they make up a very small percentage of the instances of ‘ll. In fact, pronouns make up 3367 of the 3442 occurrences of ‘ll, leaving 31 for there and only 75 for all other less common and perhaps difficult to pronounce nouns/noun phrases. Interestingly, in view of our epigraph, there are no occurrences in MICASE of lot’ll, which doubtless underscores the effect that Ogden Nash was attempting to achieve!

It seems as though there are several factors that influence whether or not will is contracted to ‘ll in academic speech. Basically, these reasons range from who is speaking, to what type of event the speech is in, to what words are being used. By and large, it is older speakers who use the full form, especially in larger or more formal academic settings, and when their utterance-subjects are not pronouns. There is nothing very surprising about any of this. Rather what we have done is lay down a distributional template for contractions of a single modal in MICASE so that others can investigate comparable phenomena. We await to hear what they find.