Accommodation, dialect contact and grammatical variation: Verbs of obligation in the Anglophone community in Japan

The present study investigates dialect contact and linguistic accommodation in the use of verbs expressing obligation (such as MUST, HAVE GOT TO, HAVE TO and GOT TO) among native speakers of English resident in Japan, using a social network approach. Approximately 500 tokens were extracted from conversations between 39 native speakers of English from England, the US and New Zealand, recorded in single-nationality dyads, both immediately upon arrival in Japan and after a period of one year. Statistical analysis revealed that the informants from England actually diverged from the forms typically used by the Americans. The results, however, demonstrate the importance of social network strength in accounting for the consequences of dialect contact and short to medium-term linguistic accommodation.