This paper will discuss the role of modality in UN Security Council resolutions. As a work in progress on whether the use of strategic vagueness in UN resolutions has contributed to the outbreak of the second Gulf war, this work proposes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the role of vagueness of the central modal verbs shall, should, and may in the institutional language of the UN, drawing upon Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (Methods of critical discourse analysis.
Sage Publications, London, 2001) and Jenins (Modality in English syntax Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1972), Gotti (Specialized discourse: linguistic features and changing conventions. Peter Lang, Bern, 2003), and Trosborg’s (Rhetorical strategies in legal language: discourse analysis of statutes and contracts. Narr, Tubingen, 1997) theories on modality. Observing the semantic and linguistic values of these modals, the analysis investigates their double-faced strength: though they can be used to guarantee a wide degree of applicability of the resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, supporting a legislative intent of using vagueness as a political strategy.

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