Abstract
This paper examines the role of deontic and epistemic central modality as a discursive strategy to express vagueness in the United Nations Security Council Resolutions on the Syrian armed conflict. The paper follows a corpus-based methodology with a two-fold objective: (i) identification, quantification and analysis of the central modal verbs retrieved from the resolutions, and (ii) the description of the communicative functions performed by these verbs. Our ultimate aim is to reveal the use of deliberate flexible language leading to ambiguous positioning towards the Syrian armed conflict in the United Nations Security Council Resolutions which have been issued since 2012. The consequences associated with the institutional use of flexible language and ambiguous positioning in the resolutions under study will also be accounted for.
About the authors
María Victoria Martín de la Rosa works as an English lecturer at Complutense University in Madrid. Apart from her participation in research projects on European evidentiality and modality, her main field of research lies on exploring the use of metaphor in different areas such as advertising discourse or the North American education policy. Her recent publications include articles in national and international journals such as Ibérica (2017) or Journal of Gender Studies (2019).
Elena Domínguez Romero is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Complutense University in Madrid. Her research interests include evidentiality and modality in media discourse as well as applied linguistics and innovative teaching. She is a member of the projects EUROEVIDMOD “Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages” and EVIDISPRAG “Evidentiality: A Discourse-Pragmatic Study of English and Other European Languages” and co-editor of the volumes Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages (Peter Lang 2017) and Thinking Modally. English and Contrastive Studies on Modality (Cambridge Scholars 2015).
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