Analysing modulation of United Kingdom precedents from perspective of systemic functional grammar and some suggestions of legal English teaching

Abstract

There have been a lot of materials in teaching legal English in recent years. In the context of applying precedents as a source of law in Vietnamese legal framework, the precedents of the countries where English is a first language also become a meaningful resource for teaching legal English. Legal discourses have their own features and obligation-describing linguistic characteristics are one of the most featured of them. In the light of Systemic Functional Grammar, this paper describes the obligatory features of precedents by the modulation analysis with qualitative methods. Investigating 1,164 sentences of two precedents which were presented on 94 pages of A4 size paper, the result showed that the proportion of sentences containing modulation elements in the UK precedents was scanty. It could be concluded that that feature was a characteristic of the English precedent's modulation. In addition, obligatory characteristic was not a featured one of all legal discourses. Based on the analysis of the modulation system of the United Kingdom precedents, we made some recommendations for the teaching of legal English related to the modulation system and the precedents as useful legal materials.