This article investigates the use of modality in legislative discourse through a corpus-based analysis of the Malaysian Companies Act 2016. The Act, which received Royal Assent on 31 August 2016, was pre-processed by removing structural headings, resulting in a corpus of approximately 142,000 words organized into numerous clauses. Adopting a corpus-based quantitative approach, the study employs UAM Corpus Tool version 6.2 as an automated tool to identify and annotate modality features in the text.
The findings indicate that verbal modality is overwhelmingly prevalent in the Act, while non-verbal modality is virtually negligible. Within the verbal domain, modal auxiliaries—particularly shall and may—are the primary devices for expressing obligation and permission, reflecting the legal text’s strong orientation toward deontic modality. Shall functions as the principal marker of mandatory obligations, whereas may encodes permission and choice, thus mediating between coercive force and regulatory flexibility.
Other auxiliaries (would, will, should) and semi-modals (e.g. need not) occur only sporadically, mainly to signal the absence of obligation. Lexical items such as required, require, requiring, requires, and necessary further dominate the expression of deontic meaning, reinforcing the obligation-centred character of the discourse. In contrast, adjectives such as likely and possible contribute only marginally to epistemic modality, and able and unable express dynamic modality in a similarly limited manner.
Overall, the study elucidates key characteristics of modality in legislative texts and points to the value of extending such analyses to larger corpora to deepen their scientific contribution. This paper was funded by Ho Chi Minh City University of Law. Department of Legal Foreign Languages, Ho Chi Minh City University of Law, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam Department of Literature and Linguistics, Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City), Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam Correspondence to Ly Tuan Phan or Truc Ngoc Thanh Hoang.
The authors declare no competing interests. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
