A Contrastive Study of Deontic Modality in Parallel Texts

This article is a contrastive study of deontic modal markers in three parallel texts. It analyses the modality system in the English, Russian and French texts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights accounting for the ambiguity of some English modal verbs in legal texts and the difficulty in rendering them into a different language. The research reveals modal markers used to express deontic permission, deontic obligation and deontic prohibition in the three parallel texts; semantic similarities and discrepancies between these modal markers; and translation strategies employed to render the English modal markers into Russian and French. The article responds to the need for a systematic analysis of deontic modal markers in English, Russian and French due to the semantic and syntactic differences among the German, Romance and Slavic languages. The article concludes that French and Russian have more in common than French and English or Russian and English in terms of the deontic modality.

Tryb rozkazujący – uwagi o definiowaniu pojęcia i zakresie jego użycia w opisach systemu fleksyjnego współczesnego języka polskiego

The aim of this paper is to present how the imperative mood is defined in the descriptions of the inflection system of the contemporary Polish language. First of all, imperative mood is considered to be the value of one of the inflection categories of mood, and the forms representing it, e.g. zrób! (‘do!’), myj! (‘wash!’) are considered to be in opposition to the forms of the declarative and the conditional moods. On the other hand, the imperative is a grammatical means that expresses the so-called deontic modality and utterances with imperative forms are treated, before anything else, as acts of directive speech. This way of defining the imperative mood is the reason why the status of such forms as wygraj! (‘win!’), otrzymaj! (‘receive!’), (nie) umieraj! (‘[not] die!’) or bądź (szczęśliwy) (‘be [happy]’) is problematic, because they constitute a non-directive use of the imperative mood. The conclusion is that the way of defining the imperative mood in Polish requires clarification.

Impersonalización, modalidad deóntica y discurso judicial: un estudio del modal δεῖ en Lisias

Impersonalization is a communicative peculiarity of courtroom discourse and the modal verb δεῖ is one of the linguistic devices that encode it in Greek. Δεῖ expresses deontic modality, which includes directive value for the expression of orders and other directive speech acts. This paper offers a study of δεῖ in Lysias’ forensic speeches.

EXPRESSION OF INDUCEMENT IN KOREAN AND BULGARIAN

This article attempts to present some means of expressing inducement in Korean and Bulgarian and to suggest some features discovered in the translation corpus, composed of five original Korean novels and their translations in Bulgarian. Unlike imperative mood, which is a grammatically concretized notion of deontic modality, inducement is a complex unity formed by various elements such as morphological, syntactic and lexical elements. Therefore, it can be realized both directly and indirectly through the means, which express / do not express inducement in its own form. As for the direct way, Bulgarian has a synthetic and an analytic form. Korean has only a synthetic form, but it has six imperative endings, differing in terms of formality and politeness. Regarding the indirect way, some means like interrogative sentences with the verb in indicative mood and declarative sentences with modal verb are actively used in both languages, while others are used only in Bulgarian. For example, the use of a declarative sentence with a future tense verb in the indicative mood for the purpose of expressing inducement is clearly confirmed in Bulgarian, but in Korean this kind of sentence does not perform the same function at all. From the studied translation materials five main asymmetric features have been found – in the person of the addressee, the voice of the sentence, the way of expressing the inducement, the sentence structure and the way of strengthening the persistence.

AN ANALYSIS OF MODALITY IN EMMA WATSON AND MICHAEL KIMMEL’S SPEECH TEXTS

This study used Palmer’s (1986) theory to analyzed Modality and Halliday (2008) to analyze the meaning of modality. Relating to the statements above, this study was proposed to answer two articulated research problems, namely; (1) what are the types of modality found in Emma Watson and Michael Kimmel’s Speech Texts? And (2) To what extent do Emma Watson and Michael Kimmel’s Speech Texts show similarities and differences, if any, in their use of types of modality? This study employs a descriptive qualitative design. The data were all of the speech by Emma Watson and Michael Kimmel’s Speech Texts that contain modality. In terms of types of modality, 30 data of modality were found. The data are classified into two types of modality: Epistemic modality consists of 10 data; judgments (5 data) and modifications (5 data). Deontic modality consists of 20 data; directives (3 data), modifications (4 data), subjectivity (5 data), imperatives (3 data), commissives (2 data), and volitives (3 data). Moreover, in terms of similarities and differences, the data are classified into two terms similarities and differences. We found 11 data of similarities and differences in types of modality: In terms of similarities in types of epistemic modality (3 data) and similarities in types of deontic modality (2 data). In terms of differences in epistemic modality (2 data) and differences in deontic modality (4 data). Keywords: Modality, Epistemic, and Deontic

Language as Action: A Discourse-Stylistic Analysis of Mood Features in Michelle Obama’S Final Speech

This paper aims to examine the stylistic effect of the mood features in Michelle Obama’s final address to the Americans. Anchored on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Discourse Stylistics, it basically focuses on the mood structures and the modality types registered in the speech. The findings disclose that the then U.S. first lady relies more on declarative mood and deontic modality to convey her message. The study thus infers that in her final message to her country citizens, Michelle Obama concentrates on action clauses and behaves as advisor towards women and men, as well as young and adults.

The force dynamics of adjectival deontic modality in the mediatised register of the fatwa: a corpus cognitive–semantic analysis

This study offers new insights into how the cognitive–semantic analysis of adjectival deontic modality in the mediatised ‘fatwa’ register can be methodologically enhanced at both quantitative and qualitative levels. Drawing on the force-dynamics model originated by Talmy (1981 , 1988 ) and developed by Sweetser (1990) , the adjectivally modal expressions of obligation and permission have been investigated in an electronic corpus of fatwas (353,293 words in 1,440 texts). The research data is manipulated by the Wmatrix ( Rayson, 2003 ) corpus tool with a view to calculating the relevant modal keywords and generating their concordances; further, the interactive register analysis of the tenor in the fatwa discourse is provided in a way that ( i) facilitates the concordance reading of the adjectival keywords of deontic modality, and ( ii) examines the force dynamics underlying these adjectival keywords in terms of their modally interactive meanings. The study has reached three main findings. First, in the specialised corpus of electronic fatwas there are five keywords of adjectival deontic modality: obligatory, obliged, permissible, impermissible and forbidden. Second, the force dynamics of obligatory, obliged and permissible reveals enacting positive-compulsion with attitudinal variations of objective and subjective meanings towards real-world content (themes) and participants (questioner and questionee) in the mediatised register of the fatwa. Third, complementary to the second, the force dynamics of impermissible and forbidden reveals a set of debarring negative-restriction barriers of various forms, namely personal, collective, generic and topical, in the same fatwa register.

A corpus-based study on deontic modality in Competition Law: Insights from the English-Greek language pair

This study investigates deontic modality, the grammatical category through which legal texts express mainly obligation and permission, in an English-Greek bilingual corpus composed of legislative texts related to European Union (EU) Competition Law. More specifically, the study is based on Biel’s discussion on deontic modality, i.e. deontic obligation and deontic permission (Biel 2014: 158). The analysis of the data is mainly quantitative, while a small-scale qualitative analysis is also carried out when necessary. The results of the study are compared with the specific guidelines proposed by the EU Institutions for English and Greek, i.e. the Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in the drafting of European Union legislation (2015), the English Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission for English (2018) and the Greek Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission for Greek (n.d.), as well as with those of earlier studies on legislative texts.