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In the context of plain language efforts, shall in legal texts has been vigorously targeted and criticized for being archaic and ambiguous. Consequently, language planning experts have sought its complete suppression or a “disciplined use” in public and private legal documents and across jurisdictions. At the same time, appropriate substitutes have had to be found to replace shall, most of them posing certain difficulties. This paper outlines the current debate surrounding the use of shall in legal texts and discusses the substitution strategies deployed in the countries where shall has been removed from certain legal texts altogether or where it has been used only sporadically. The second part of the paper presents synchronic and diachronic corpus-based research into the use of shall in UK legislation, EU legislation, and British contracts (in comparison to Australian contracts) to find out to what extent the plain language efforts targeting shall have been successful in private legal documents and whether the substitutes deployed in legislation are of any use in private documents. The results show substantial differences across genres and jurisdictions. Overall, it appears that the term “modal revolution” coined by Christopher Williams aptly describes the current situation.

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This paper explored the modal verb shall in formal and informal writings in academic and fiction registers. It focused on the frequencies of shall across academic and fiction domains in contemporary American English and the differences in the usage of shall between academic and fiction registers of contemporary American English. The researchers used a corpus linguistic method. Data were collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and analysed using Hanks’ (2004) Corpus Pattern Analysis technique. All occurrences of shall in academic and fiction writing styles of COCA were retrieved, and 400 concordance lines consisting of 200 texts from each domain were collected. The texts were analysed and described in accordance with their syntactic, stylistic, and semantic characteristics. Results showed that shall was rare in COCA’s academic and fiction registers as the overall frequencies were 59.77 and 68.34 words per million, respectively. From all the 400 tokens being analysed, the researchers found that shall in the observed data could be classified as rules and regulations, direction, prediction, volition, and etc. The uses of shall in both domains in COCA varied syntactically, semantically, and stylistically.

This paper explored the modal verb shall in formal and informal writings in academic and fiction registers. It focused on the frequencies of shall across academic and fiction domains in contemporary American English and the differences in the usage of shall between academic and fiction registers of contemporary American English. The researchers used a corpus linguistic method. Data were collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and analysed using Hanks' (2004) Corpus Pattern Analysis technique. All occurrences of shall in academic and fiction writing styles of COCA were retrieved, and 400 concordance lines consisting of 200 texts from each domain were collected. The texts were analysed and described in accordance with their syntactic, stylistic, and semantic characteristics. Results showed that shall was rare in COCA's academic and fiction registers as the overall frequencies were 59.77 and 68.34 words per million, respectively. From all the 400 tokens being analysed, the researchers found that shall in the observed data could be classified as rules and regulations, direction, prediction, volition, and etc. The uses of shall in both domains in COCA varied syntactically, semantically, and stylistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the status of shall in today’s legal drafting and legal translation, and by presenting typologies by a number of authors briefly addresses the variety of meanings it is used to express, in both legislation and contracts. It introduces the “shall dilemma” faced by non-native legal translators working both from and into English. The dilemma consists in the discrepancy between the promiscuous and abundant use of shall in authentic as well as translated documents, on the one hand, and the recommendations found in various drafting manuals promoting either a shall-free policy or a disciplined use of shall, on the other hand. The research part presents the results of a survey carried out among a carefully chosen sample of professional legal translators to determine what their policy is on the use of shall. The results include both quantitative findings and additional comments made by the translators, and confirms the divide between actual practice and the recommendations. In the next section of the paper, the results are applied and a series of step-by-step exercises are introduced which should raise the awareness of legal translation trainees of the ambiguity of shall and teach them to use it in a reasoned and disciplined way.

Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the modal ‘shall’, whose excessive use can be problematic both in legal translation and interpretation (Coode 1843, Driedger 1976). The context of analysis is the EU for offering a relative young legal environment where translation represents the main channel of communication. The analysis moves from the deontic speech acts of ordering and prohibiting and looks at examples of performativity where ‘shall’ is not only deontically binding, but it is also used to express a necessary condition or to set a new state of things up. The disambiguation is particularly evident in multilingual translation and is performed with the help of parallel concordances, which also shed light on the conceptual framework of norms. Data consist of a parallel corpus including English, French, German and Italian versions of EU legislative texts chosen between 2001-04. As a term of comparison, a small comparable corpus containing English orginal texts has also been compiled.

Highlights: [•] This paper contributes to the debate on the use of shall in legislative drafting. [•] It shows its decline in UK legislation started in the early 1990s. [•] It argues that its gradual abandonment is due to a restricted notion of its meaning. [•] As philosophers of law have shown, shall can be performative, as well as deontic. [•] Shall substitutes are not totally free from the problems for which shall is blamed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scientific article is devoted to the study of shall/will semantics in Old English time. In order to understand the current state of the language, it is necessary to regard each phenomenon of the modern language as a result of a long historical change, development and transformation. The issue of meaning and function of will/shall in ancient and modern English is of great interest in theoretical grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]