A Corpus-Based Study of Deontic Modality in Legal Discourse

Abstract

This article contributes to the study of English deontic modal means as a key linguistic phenomenon. It responds to the need of a systematic analysis of English deontic modal auxiliaries used in international legal documents of various genres. Deontic modality is studied as a conceptual category from the semantic perspective. Deontic modals that express permission, obligation and prohibition are treated with special attention to the applicability to Legal English. The corpus includes UN documents of five legal genres: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Statute of the International Court of Justice, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. These texts were selected to identify frequency, distribution and semantic content of modal auxiliaries which express permission, obligation and prohibition in legal discourse. The aim to reveal similarities and differences in the use of deontic modal auxiliaries in General English and Legal English has been also set.