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Linguistic Patterns of Modality in UN Resolutions: The Role of Shall, Should, and May in Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War

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Abstract

This paper will discuss the role of modality in UN Security Council resolutions. As a work in progress on whether the use of strategic vagueness in UN resolutions has contributed to the outbreak of the second Gulf war, this work proposes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the role of vagueness of the central modal verbs shall, should, and may in the institutional language of the UN, drawing upon Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (Methods of critical discourse analysis. Sage Publications, London, 2001) and Jenkins (Modality in English syntax. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1972), Gotti (Specialized discourse: linguistic features and changing conventions. Peter Lang, Bern, 2003), and Trosborg's (Rhetorical strategies in legal language: discourse analysis of statutes and contracts. Narr, Tubingen, 1997) theories on modality. Observing the semantic and linguistic values of these modals, the analysis investigates their double-faced strength: though they can be used to guarantee a wide degree of applicability of the resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, supporting a legislative intent of using vagueness as a political strategy.

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Notes

  1. For further details, cf. [29].

  2. All the Security Council resolutions cited in this paper are available at http://www.un.org/en/sc/documents/resolutions/index.shtml (Last accessed: February 2016).

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  1. Universita’ degli Studi di Napoli Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples, Italy

    Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo

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Scotto di Carlo, G. Linguistic Patterns of Modality in UN Resolutions: The Role of Shall, Should, and May in Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War. Int J Semiot Law 30, 223–244 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9488-3

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