Must Can: Double‐Modal Constructions in Hong Kong English

Previous studies have focused on double‐modal constructions (DMs) in Englishes in the Inner Circle at the expense of the Outer Circle. Using data collected from internet forums and corpora, this study aims to narrow the research gap by examining DMs in Hong Kong English (HKE), an English variety in the Outer Circle. This study explores the structural properties, semantic properties and the substrate influence of Cantonese on DMs in HKE. Regarding their structures, some DMs are common in HKE but not in other world Englishes. Regarding their meaning, the combinations ‘epistemic–epistemic’ and ‘epistemic–dynamic’ are much more frequent than ‘dynamic/deontic–epistemic’. Finally, DMs in HKE likely emerged due to the substrate effect from the Cantonese modal system: The most frequent DMs in HKE have at least one or even multiple counterparts in Cantonese. By contrast, rarer DMs may not have (well‐formed) Cantonese counterparts.