Specific manifestations of modal meanings of necessity and ability in professional legal discourse

The research is aimed at eliciting the tendencies of the expression pertinent to the modal meanings of necessity and ability in the texts of regulatory legal acts and in commands of police officers. The author concentrates on specifying the sub-meanings which manifest themselves in the analyzed texts, the correlations of the meanings of necessity and ability with other modal meanings, which are typical of legal discourse, and the functional-semantic types of utterances which express the meanings in question. The research is based on the language material from the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation, the Code of the United States of America (Title 18), as well as the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure of the United States of America. The sub-meanings of necessity and ability, which have been identified as regular from the point of view of actualization in legal discourse, include external functional service necessity and external conventional deontic ability. The author also considers it expedient to talk about conditional necessity in the texts of regulatory legal acts in both languages. Ability and necessity often correlate in the texts of regulatory legal acts. Another typical correlation of these meanings is with the meanings of intellectual evaluation, in particular, that of measure and degree. The means of expression for analogous commands implying an external functional service necessity in Russian and English differ in terms of general trends of expression. The most obvious tendency is to skip the verb stem of the command. In this case, nominal phrases or adverbs/adverbial phrases are typically used, clarifying the nature of the action performed. This trend is noted in both Russian and English. However, the analytical structure of the English language, which requires the overt expression of syntactic connections, in some cases makes the use of a command impossible without a verbal stem. The rights voiced by the police officer to the suspect, the offender and the witness are a typical environment for the actualization of ability, namely external conventional deontic ability. In the course of the research, the author also identified an additional typological marker of legal discourse, which is a high density of the use of the meaning of potentiality, which unites both the meaning of necessity and the meaning of ability, necessarily correlating with each of them. The main functional-semantic types of utterances that realize necessity and ability are the constative message and the directive. The general features that the research elicited are similar in Russian and English and thus can be regarded as discourse specific. They only differ in reference to the means of expression of the modal meanings, which are conditioned by the language structure. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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