A semantic analysis of modality in legal texts

Abstract EN

The present paper is about modality.

Modality is concerned with utterances of a non-factual kind, i.

e.

concerned with the opinion and attitude of the speaker.

In short, modality is a semantic concept.

Halliday (1976: 197) views modality as "a form of participation by the speaker in the speech event".

Through modality, the speaker associates with the thesis an indication of its status and validity in his own judgment; he intrudes and takes up a position.

The main concern of the paper is to examine the ways used to realized modality and the meaning which it expresses.

Modality will be explored in legal texts.

The study hypothesized that law makers use modal expressions to voice their goals and purposes, and give their judgments and beliefs.

The data used will be the civil law "The profession of Advocate" (1964).

The modal to be used for the analysis of the corpus is Haliday m(1976).

The findings which the present paper has come to have revealed that modulation are most frequently used, while modality has not been used at all.