A Corpus-Based Study On Modality In Maritime Law English

Modality is a significant instrument for expressing semantics in legal English. It can be used to express certain speech act. The usage of modality is special and conveys specific function in legal texts. Maritime law, as an important kind of legal text, is imbedded the basic features of legal language:accuracy, strictness and logicality.This paper aims to study the similarities and differences of modality use between China Maritime Code and western maritime law and the distribution features of modality between these two legal texts. Within the framework of Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, two small size corpuses are established with the text of CMC and WML as linguistic data. A contrast analysis is processed qualitatively and quantitatively through statistical tools such as:AntConc and SPSS.The analysis shows that there is a significant difference on the modality use between China Maritime Code and western maritime law. Four types of modality expressions are employed more frequently in China Maritime Code than that in WML; these two legal texts are inclined to adopt low and median value modality, however, the frequency of low and median value modality in China Maritime Code is higher than that in western maritime law. An addition to this, implicit subjectivity and implicit objectivity are two ways to realize the interpersonal function in China Maritime Code and western maritime law, while explicit subjectivity and explicit objectivity are not the method to achieve interpersonal function in legal text.This paper is helpful for us to obtain better comprehension of the rights and obligations in the China Maritime Code clause. At the same time, it is hoped that this paper can contribute to the teaching and translation in some degree.