Deontic modality and argumentative construction in Pope Francis' Apostolic Letters:

a semantic-discursive analysis of deonticity

Abstract

In this article, we seek to investigate the semantic-discursive aspects of the deontic modality in the Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letters written in Spanish language between the years 2013 and 2019. For this, we use the typology of the modalities of Hengeveld (2004), which defines the deontic modality as that which is relative to what is legally, socially, and morally accepted in terms of rules and social conduct. From the reading and analysis of the corpus, we found that the semantic subject tends to be more specified [+ specific], whose most frequent modal orientation was for the Participant, in which the obligation, permission or prohibition of (not) performing the event described by the predicate. We found that the states-of-affairs, on which the deontic modal values fell, in the majority, the obligation, were mostly dynamic [+ dynamic] and with positive polarity, that is, without the preposition of any negation particle.