A Corpus-based Study On Interpersonal Meanings Of Modality In Court Arguments

Modal expressions can be used to construe interpersonal meanings which concern speakers' judgments of the effectiveness of their propositions,the required obligations for the listeners and the personal wishes in their proposals.The purpose of this study is to explore how judges and lawyers use modal expressions to construct interpersonal meanings,particularly evaluate human behaviors in American court arguments from the perspective of Appraisal Theory which is the theoretical foundation of this study.A small legal language corpus is compiled including 30 oral arguments from the Supreme Court of the United States,recorded between Feburary 24 and March 31,2015.The research focus in this study is modality.Based on Halliday's modality theory(2004),all the modal expressions are coded and classified into different groups according to four criteria: speakers,orientations,types and values.The quantitative results for the two groups of speakers,judges and lawyers,are compared by using chi-square tests and Fisher's exact tests.Results show that on the macro level,there is no significant difference between the two speaker groups(p =.105>.05).However,the judges and the lawyers are found to differ significantly in their use of modal values(p =.004<.05)and expressions of the five individual Judgment types,namely normality(p =.027<.05),tenacity(p =.000<.05),veracity(p =.024<.05),capacity(p =.005<.05)and propriety expressions(p =.007<.05).The qualitative analysis of the Case No.13-1175 shows that modality expressions contribute to the conveyance of attitude and the appraisal of propriety has the highest frequency among the five Judgment types.Moreover,judges and lawyers vary in the use of modal values due to their different status in court.This study tries to analyze the interpersonal meanings of modality from a new perspective,Appraisal Theory.It is expected to have pedagogical implications for court arguments and legal language teaching in China and contribute to the understanding of legal language.