An Investigation into the Linguo-Semantic Implications of Modality, Mood and Modal Verbs in the Taraba State Civil Service Rules
Zama Danladi Tanko
Victoria Jacob Ahmadu &
Jennifer Harrison
Department of English, College of Education, Zing, Taraba State, Nigeria
Abstract
No doubt, language is one of the most effective means of communication whether in formal and informal speech situations. It is in public domain that apart from communicating ideas and thoughts, language is known to serve as a vehicle for forging friendship and expressing solidarity. Using language in a communicative context is a very serious and intricate enterprise. To achieve effective communication in the communicative chain, the speaker (sender) encodes and transmits information which must be decoded by the receiver. The Taraba State Civil Service Rules, hereafter (TSCSR) is a document based on close observation of human nature and chartered on values intrinsic to employer/labour relationship for productivity in the public service. It is instructive to note that rules are laws and as such normative social practice which purport to guide human behaviour in order to enhance maximum productivity. The aspect of linguistics commonly referred to as applied linguistics tends to treat language use in context associated with specialized registers (e.g. academic, business, journalese officialise or legalese). In the context of this paper, the interest is on contextual dimension of language, particularly in the context of law(legalese). The paper draws its data from the Taraba State Civil Service Rules (TSCSR). For the analysis, attention is placed on the use of modality and the modal verbs to be able to arrive at the contextual meaning of some of the modal verbs used in the text, Taraba State Civil Service Rules. In specific terms, the paper focuses on the grammatical categories often referred to as modality and modal verbs and concludes that they convey expectations, obligations, responsibility, advice and warning and other related meanings as the case may be. The paper borrows the content of quantitative research paradigm to show that the Taraba State Civil Service Rules is rich in mood, modal verbs and modality. In addition, these concepts are not only related in grammatical terms, but are used to give the rules their predictive sense: obligation/necessity, futurity and certainty in a conscious and strategic attempt to guide the target recipients, in this case, the civil servants, on their obligations to perform at their duty posts or places of primary assignment. The paper also reveals how the semantics of the different patterns of these linguistic resources relate to different occasions of use, namely, expectations, obligations, advice and warning.
Key words: context, rules, semantics, mood, modality, modal verbs, deontic epistemic, dynamic, boulomaic.
Introduction
Functionalist grammarians and linguistic semanticists have approached modality in English in both formal and logical dimensions. Halliday (189) says modality is part of the interpersonal constituents of language and subsequently classifies the English modal auxiliaries in terms of modality and modulation- the ideational constituent of language. Lyons (792) sees them as epistemic and deonic. However, according to Yowell (101), the generative grammarians deal with them as root and epistemic modals. Of note is the characterisation by Lyons (793) that modal are concerned with