Hedged performatives in spoken American English: recent change and variation in their use

This article examines the diachronic development of hedged performatives (HP) in spoken American English. HPs (e.g. I have to say , I must admit ) combine a (semi-)modal verb and a performative verb, and were first analyzed by Fraser (1975). While subsequent research has investigated their discursive functions and established them as ‘constructions’, their diachronic development has not been analyzed within a Construction Grammar perspective. This article addresses this gap using three corpora: the TV Corpus , Movie Corpus and spoken COCA. We investigate fifteen HPs formed with three modals ( have to , must , can ), first sketching a constructional network with a macro-level ([ I + MODAL + V perf ]), modal-specific meso-level (e.g. [ I must V perf ]) and micro-level (e.g. [ I must say ]). Results show different diachronic trends at the meso-level: [ I must V perf ] declines, [ I have to V perf ] increases, and [ I can V perf ] remains stable. These trends diverge from those of the base modals, confirming their constructional status. For must and have to HPs, change operates primarily at the meso-level, driven by evolving discourse norms. At the micro-level, must/have to HPs follow the meso-level trend, while can HPs show more variation. Finally, HPs are overrepresented in scripted speech, although diachronic trends remain consistent across registers.