A Diachronic Study On Shall As A Deontic Modal Verb In English Legislative Texts

Shall(not) is widely used as embodiment of legal speech acts expressing authorized, mandatory and prohibitive meaning in legal English. “ The quality of translating legislative provisions or even the whole legislative texts also depends on the accuracy of the translation of shall”( Xie & Ma, 2010).However, there exists a paradoxical phenomenon concerning the use of shall in English literature, on the one hand, the frequent use of shall remains to be taken as one of the lexical features of legal English, while on the other hand, some scholars have criticized the abuse of shall. The same is the situation in China: for one thing, scholars criticize the abuse of shall in translating Chinese laws and regulations, for another thing, the abuse of shall exists in the translations of local and national laws. People can't help wondering: is shall still the main lexis in composing legislative texts? What is the cause of the paradox concerning the use of shall?The author of the paper first reveals the paradoxical phenomenon concerning the use of shall in legislative texts. Then she makes a literature review about speech acts theory, taxonomy of modal verbs and Plain English Movement. On the basis of this, taking three English legislative texts from 1789 to 2014 as data and using Microsoft software and manual collection, she mainly explores the changes and status quo concerning the use of shall as a deontic modal verb in legislative texts.It is observed from the study that the Anglo American countries are gradually fading the use of shall while may and must are now extensively used as main deontic modal verbs in legislative texts. Remaining to perform important function in legal English, shall is no longer the most frequently used deontic modal verb in legislative texts. It is hoped that this study can be helpful to the effective publicity and communication of Chinese legislative texts.