Legal norms as objects of (non-)commitment

In linguistics, the notion of commitment is associated with a range of other notions, such as belief (Dendale & Coltier 2005: 127), will (Palmer 1998: 102) and responsibility (Nølke et al. 2004: 44). Belief and will are examples of psychological states the speaker has towards a certain proposition – they are also known as propositional attitudes – while responsibility has to do with the speaker being the source of a certain proposition. The aim of this article is to examine the relation between these different notions. I will do this by analysing the use of deontic sentences in different types of legal and administrative texts in Dutch.

The article is organised as follows. In section 1, I will provide some background on deontic sentences (§1.1), on legal and administrative discourse (§1.2) and on the notion of commitment (§1.3). In section 2, the notion of commitment will be applied to deontic sentences, both in terms of responsibility (§2.1) and propositional attitudes (§2.2).