Revealing the Various Flavors of the Modal Shall in the French Version of the Constitution of the Celestial Church of Christ

Abstract

This paper examines the various meanings of the modal shall in the French version of the Constitution of the Celestial Church of Christ. Indeed, the translation of this modal reveals that in various contexts it expresses several ideas including obligation, necessity, prohibition, permanent dispositions, and future dispositions. It is a semantic phenomenon. This paper uses mixed methods. In fact, the 178 occurrences of the modal shall have been searched for using a computer search engine. The flavor of each occurrence of the modal has been analysed and taken into account. For example, the deontic flavor has been used 145 times with various meanings including strong obligation, weak obligation, necessity and prohibition. Modal semantics has been studied using Kratzer’s concept of conversational background which comprises the modal base and the ordering source. The materials used are a soft copy of the Constitution and a computer search engine. The findings of this paper include the following: the modal shall has deontic, epistemic, teleological, and dynamic flavors in the context of this research. Shall is a neutral modal with meaning potentials that are activated by the various contexts in which it is used. Modal meaning in the framework of this research is determined by the context, the flavor and the timeframe.