Abstract
This is a corpus-based study on the uses and functions of modal verbs “will” and “shall” in the Nigerian legal discourse. It aims at examining their pragmatic functions as hedges in the legal discourse. It specifically aims to investigate how hedges are used in the legal texts to indicate precision and uncertainty. To achieve these objectives a specialised corpus was constructed which we named as “Nigerian Law Corpus” (NLC). The compilation of NLC is based on the Nigerian court proceedings and law reports. Hence, the compiled NLC corpus contains 546,313-word tokens. Meanwhile, reference corpus of law with 2.2 million word tokens based on the British National Corpus (BNC) is retrieved for comparison with NLC. To this end, two concordance tools were utilised to analyse the data of this study viz. “AntConc version 3.5” a semi-automated computer-aided tool and a web-based tool “Lextutor version 7”. Based on the frequency distribution the results revealed that model verb “will” featured in 493 instances in the NLC and 7,711 instances in the BNC Law, while, “shall” occurred at 401 instances in NLC and 1,348 instances in BNC Law. The results also indicated that “shall” was an overused element in NLC than in BNC Law with standardised concordance hits per million (NLC=734, BNC Law =589) while, “will” is the least used element of NLC (902 instances per million) compared to BNC Law (3,369 instances per million). The study also enumerated different semantic and pragmatic functions of “will” and “shall” in legal discourse, citing examples from both tag corpus (NLC) and reference corpus (BNC Law). Some of the functions as hedges (conveying a truth value of a proposition) are epistemic meanings: politeness, obligation, precision, duty, intention, and permission. In nutshell, the results indicated that “will” and “shall” are used by legal practitioners more especially lawyers in a courtroom to achieve precision in their argument in a case to persuade the court by showing the true value of commitment of the proposition.
Highlights
The ever greater interest of linguists more especially the corpus linguists, terminologists, phraseologists and the text linguists or stylists has been centred on the exploration of distinctive characteristics of language used in different discourses and across the various genres
Based on the frequency distribution the results revealed that model verb “will” featured in 493 instances in the Nigerian Law Corpus” (NLC) and 7,711 instances in the British National Corpus (BNC) Law, while, “shall” occurred at 401 instances in NLC and 1,348 instances in BNC Law
This is the kind of a language construes in accordance to the law of countries where English is spoken as a native language (NL) like England, Australia, and America, as well as some other countries whose official language is English like Nigeria, Ghana, and India
Summary
The ever greater interest of linguists more especially the corpus linguists, terminologists, phraseologists and the text linguists or stylists has been centred on the exploration of distinctive characteristics of language used in different discourses and across the various genres These can be sum up to form a language used in a specialized discourse. Corpus-based studies make it possible to extend our understanding of language use across different genres in different linguistic domains This present study explores the uses and functions of two modal verbs (will and shall) as a form of hedges, and their frequency of occurrence in Nigerian Legal Corpus (NLC 546,313) in comparison with British National Corpus (BNC Law 2.2). Hedges are important agents in legal language, putting forth the nature of legal discourse as discipline notably preoccupied with politeness, persuasion, and vagueness in the use of language
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