Deontic Modality in a comparable legislative corpus (Arabic-Spanish): A Tool for Automatic Detection and Contrastive Analysis

Document Type : Original Article

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Spanish Language Department Faculty of Arts Cairo University

Abstract

This study presents a computational tool for the automatic detection and analysis of deontic modality (obligation, permission and prohibition) in legislative texts in Arabic and Spanish. The tool is developed in Python and it uses Stanza for text processing in both languages. A comparable corpus of legislative texts has been collected from official data sources. It consists of 5 Spanish legislative texts and their corresponding Egyptian legislative texts including the laws for Traffic, Intellectual Property, Personal Data Protection, Civil Code and the Statute of Labourers. The analysis uncovers the dynamics of how each language expresses the deontic modality within a contrastive framework. It also provides insights on the main linguistic features on how legislative texts express obligation, prohibition or permission from a qualitative and quantitative perspective. Results show that obligation is the most frequent type of deontic modality in legislative texts in both languages. However, in the Arabic corpus the distribution among the three types of deontic modality is more balanced than in Spanish, where the obligation is the dominant type of modality. On the other hand, the ‘verb’ is the Part-of-Speech mostly used to express modality in both languages.

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