The Role of Intended Audience in Determining Modality Type: A Study in Relation to the Iranian Constitution

Language, as a means of communication, offers its speakers some tools by which they can convey the meanings they intend to. One of these tools is the use of modals. Modals help the speakers to express their attitudes and opinions, regarding what is going on in a sentence. Epistemic modality deals with possibility and prediction and deontic modality concerns permission and obligation. This study aims to figure out whether Iranian constitution, as a sample of the laws set by the governments, seems likely more to convey the sense of obligation and permission to the audience(applying deontic modality),or the writers of these laws are just narrating a piece of information. For this purpose, the frequency of each modal type within Iranian constitution is evaluated and considered as an indicator of the writersʹ attitudes. Modal verbs, auxiliary modals and adverbs in the text of Iranian constitution are analyzed and different types and subtypes of modals are distinguished. The results have shown that in 83% of the applied modals, the spirit of permission and obligation for implementing these laws is very crucially and fully presented by the tool of deontic modality which is used for such purposes. Most of these obligations target the government and the permissions are mostly dedicated to people.