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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 11:3 (2020) ► pp.337–362

Development of deontic modality in Chinese civil laws

A corpus study

| University of International Business and Economics
| The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
| Zhejiang University

In legislative texts, deontic modality helps define rights, privileges, obligations, and responsibilities. Based on a corpus of Chinese civil laws from 1949 to 2015, the study investigates the development of deontic modality in Chinese civil legislative discourse and examines the variations of deontic modality diachronically from a quantitative, functional perspective, thereby shedding lights on variations of legal text. This study shows that patterns of deontic modality manifest different features in different stages. The changes of linguistic forms of deontic modality show evidence of the adaptive feature in legal language. From a quantitative perspective, the study suggests that a corpus-driven approach helps examine the development and evolution of deontic modality diachronically. It also contributes to an understanding of deontic modality mechanisms by providing both empirical evidence and theoretical insights.

Keywords: deontic modality, legal discourse, Chinese civil laws, corpus linguistics, diachronic development
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Deontic modality
  • 3.Deontic modality in legal settings
  • 4.Research methods
    • 4.1Corpus data
    • 4.2Methods
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Linguistics forms of deontic modality
    • 5.2Cluster analysis: A converging pattern
    • 5.3Distribution of deontic verbs in major deontic orientations
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1The development of deontic modality in Chinese civil laws
    • 6.2Deontic meanings in Chinese civil legal discourse
    • 6.3Prescriptive awareness and descriptive nature
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 31 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.16058.gon
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