Modals and Modality in Legal Discourse: A Corpus-Based Sociosemiotic Interpretation

In this study, parallel corpora of the Civil and Commercial Laws and the English translation of the People's Republic of China (hereinafter P. R. C.) are built. Modal verbs in the legal texts are examined from the perspective of genre analysis and semantics. Moreover, a comparative study on different variations of legal genre is adopted. This study further explores the findings from a sociosemiotic perspective in terms of the distinctions on modal verbs and modality between different variations of legal genre. The authors have noticed the disparity of modal verbs in different situations depends on distinct functions of situations. Although linguistic and textual analyses are significant in exploring issues of legal texts, it is not enough to linger within these domains.