Commissive Modality of International Legal Discourse: An Implicit Mitigation of the Bindingness

Abstract

This research focuses on the problem of the correlation between discursive modality and illocutionary force - with substantiating variations in illocutionary force as a pragmatic basis for the scale-paradigm of deontic modality, influencing the binding force of international instruments. Guided by the criterion of explicitness and implicitness of illocutionary force markers, as well as their localization in performative or propositional part, the paper categorizes five classes of commissives in relation to speech acts: Direct commissives, hedged direct commissives, indirect commissives, indirect implied commissives, hedged indirect implied commissives. Direct commissives when hedged preserve the performative verbs of self-commitment in their illocutionary part, while contain hedge structures and means of generalization in propositional part, scaling down the strength of commissive illocutionary force and associating deontic modality of commitments. Indirect commissives are illocutionary bicomponent acts, combining either expressive-commissive or assertive-commissive illocutionary forces. Indirect implied commissives and hedged indirect implied commissives rank at the penultimate and last levels of the scale of commissive deontic modality. They are devoid of a phrase subject designating the subject of the implementation of obligations. Predicates with the meanings of 'necessity' and 'requirement' indirectly mark obligations assumed whereas passive structures, nominalization, hedges, generalization, and other markers of decreased illocutionary force and associated deontic modality de-intensify such in international legal discourse.