The Use of Modality in Legal Discourse: Academic Legal Articles and Court Hearing Transcripts as a Case Study

Résumé

The thesis focuses on the implementation of Modality in legal discourse from two perspectives: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Pragmatics. Two genres of this register are selected for study: Academic Legal Articles (ALA) and Court Hearing Transcripts (CHT). Both categories of legal discourse are subjected to several comparisons. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to describe the distributions of these categories. The analysis demonstrates that the distributional variations of modality instances are tied to the nature of the discipline. The UAM CorpusTool is used to annotate all instances of Modality according to corpus genre, type, realization, orientation and source. After annotation, the statistical tools of frequency distribution and the Chi-square test are used to test the hypotheses of this thesis. The first comparison concerns the frequency of occurrence of Modality instances between the two genres. The second comparison examines modality types, specifically modalization versus modulation, along with their sub-types. The third comparison focuses on the distribution of modality realization types, either congruent or metaphorical between ALA and CHT. Within this scope, a deeper comparison addresses the distributions of types of congruent modality and sets of metaphorical modality in the stated genres. The final comparison examines the rate of recurrence of orientation (i.e., subjective vs. objective) between ALA and CHT. As far as ALA are concerned, the distributions of Modality types, realizations and orientations are found to be closely related to the genre’s characteristics, such as formality, objectivity, clarity, impersonality and precision, which are central to the academic legal discourse. Moreover, the Court Hearing Transcripts genre requires additional investigation, as the diverse sources of modality within this context result in varying frequencies of modality, modality types, modality realizations and modality orientations. These frequency differences reflect the varying power ranks among courtroom participants. In interpreting these results, both the notion of Context and the Appraisal Framework are employed, offering deeper insights into how modality operates within each genre and how evaluative language reflects the social roles and power dynamics inherent in legal discourse. Additionally, theories such as language as social acting, politeness, face, the presentation of the self, power and solidarity and the theory of impression management are used to interpret the use of modality in ALA and CHT, providing a richer understanding of how modality reflects both the common discourse to which they belong which is the legal register and the specificities of each genre.

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