This study investigates the use of double modals in Australian and New Zealand English using Twitter/𝕏 data. Double modals are rare grammatical constructions long believed to be limited to regional dialects in the Northern UK and the Southern US. Utilizing a geolocated corpus of over 80 million tweets, the study identifies 314 authentic double modal instances across 51 types, primarily occurring in informal tweets. Findings reveal widespread, albeit low-frequency, usage across both countries without clear geographical patterns. The results align with recent studies suggesting double modals are not confined to specific regions but are possible for most English speakers. The study also questions the traditional Scots-Irish origin theory, proposing an alternative view where the feature is a broader syntactic possibility. Future research should explore larger datasets and extend investigations to outer-circle English varieties to understand better the historical spread and syntactic nature of double modals.

Construction Grammar is an emerging theory of language, but the analysis of sociolinguistic variation is still relatively underdeveloped in the framework. In this article, we consider the representation of social meaning in Construction Grammar through a corpus-based analysis of double modals in British English on social media. We describe the use of double modals in a large corpus of geolocated Twitter posts, including presenting an inventory of observed double modals and maps showing the regional distribution of each of these forms. We find that double modals show a general northern pattern and are concentrated in the Scottish Borders. We also find various rare double modals that occur more widely across the UK. To account for these results, we propose a Construction Grammar account of double modals. We argue that defining double modals as grammatical constructions requires that aspects of their social meaning be delimited, especially register and region. Furthermore, we argue that double modals may be enregistered as dialect constructions, distinguished from standard constructions of British English. We conclude by considering the importance of incorporating social meaning into Construction Grammar, underlining the value of a Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach to grammatical theory.

This article reports on the use of double modals, a non-standard syntactic feature, in the contemporary speech of the UK and Ireland. Most data on the geographic extent of the feature and its combinatorial types come from surveys or acceptability ratings or from older attestations focused on northern England, Scotland or Northern Ireland, with relatively few attestations in naturalistic data and from England and Wales. Manual verification of double modals in a large corpus of geolocated Automatic Speech Recognition transcripts from YouTube videos of local government channels from the UK and Ireland shows that the feature exhibits a larger inventory of combinatorial types than has previously been found and is attested in speech from throughout the UK and Ireland. The development may be related to ongoing changes in the semantic space occupied by modal auxiliaries in English.