Motivations for specialisation: testing the feasibility of polysemous pre-emption in the competition between will and must

The article looks at instances of specialisation for specific linguistic contexts in ‘command’ and ‘inference’ uses of will and must. It tests the feasibility of different motivations for this specialisation, such as statistical and construal pre-emption. It also proposes a new motivation for specialisation, polysemous pre-emption, i.e. whether a strongly entrenched polyseme of a given expression might pre-empt the use of an expression with a less strongly entrenched polyseme. The investigation uses corpus analysis and distinctive collexeme analysis to test the three motivations (statistical, construal, and polysemous pre-emption). The results show that all instances of specialisation with will and must could be explained through construal pre-emption and/or polysemous pre-emption, thus making recourse to statistical pre-emption unnecessary.