
Hasty et al searched for the Southern United States English double modal (DM) construction, e.g. You might could think about losing some weight. This construction is rare in other kinds of recorded speech corpora, such as sociolinguistic interviews, since it is pragmatically favored in service interactions and face-threatening negotiations. Hypothesizing that DMs might occur in doctor-patient talk, Hasty et al searched Verilogue's nationwide corpus of over 45,000 conversations. The search turned up 95 double modals, of which the majority -- surprisingly -- were produced by doctors. The study results also suggested that DMs are most frequent in discussion of and decisions about treatment, in which doctors appear to use DMs to mitigate their instructions to patients.