Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- List of abbreviations -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The genesis of contact languages: An account of different hypotheses -- 3 Modality: Necessity and obligation in English -- 4 New Englishes and modality: Different history, different scenarios -- 5 Theoretical and methodological implications -- 6 Corpus data meet survey data: Overview of the results -- 7 Discussion of the results: A pan-stratist approach -- 8 Conclusion -- Appendices -- List of the analysed or cited corpora -- References -- Index