Moet en must : 'n geval van Afrikaanse invloed op Suid-Afrikaanse Engels

Abstract

This article investigates the effect of the unique contact situation between users of Afrikaans and the native variety of South African English (SAfE) on the propagation of the distinctive macro-and microsemantic properties of SAfE must. This modal verb has gradually become less face-threatening in SAfE over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, conveying a median (weaker) degree of force just as frequently as a higher degree of force by the 1990s, which has in turn led to its increased use in deontic (personal) contexts (Wasserman 2014).These semantic changes differ greatly from the changes that occurred in other native varieties of English in the world (cf. Leech et al. 2009). The primary question this article seeks to answer is whether these distinctive properties of SAfE must have developed due to the contact that this variety has maintained with Afrikaans over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The discussion firstly provides extralinguistic motivation, and secondly linguistic (synchronic and diachronic) motivation based on corpus data, in support of the influence of Afrikaans moet on SAfE must.