Linguistic Patterns of Modality in UN Resolutions: The Role of 'Shall', 'Should', and 'May' in Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War

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 Jenkins (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.