A corpus-based analysis of modality in legislative texts: a case study

Abstract

Abstract

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.