The Use of the Present Tense in a Trilingual Legal Context

A Contrastive Approach Based on an English, French and Russian Corpus

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to outline two functions of the present tense in a legal context in English, French, and Russian. These are the constative and deontic functions. Secondly, this paper analyses, from a contrastive perspective, the linguistic properties of the three forms used in the three languages, in order to express the constative and deontic functions of the present tense in legal discourse. These are Present Simple in English, the Indicative form of the Present in French and the Imperfective Present tense in Russian. Our study is inspired by cognitive grammar, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Consequently, we use some of the terms of these three linguistic fields.

The set of documents selected and analysed for our study form two corpora: trilingual parallel corpus and comparable corpus. The parallel corpus includes the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. For the comparable corpus, we selected the Eurasian Economic Union Treaty, the original text of which is written in Russian (2014), the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the original text of which is written in English (2015), as well as the consolidated version of the Treaty on the European Union (2012) in French.

According to our analysis, the constative function of the present tense in legal discourse serves to institute and report a state of affairs, without conveying a deontic sense. On the other hand, the deontic function of the present tense is aimed at expressing obligations. Our analysis concerns the verbs the deontic sense of which is not explicitly expressed by their semantics. In this study, we assume that it is legal texts that confer the deontic interpretation on such verbs. This occurs in a specific morphosyntactic configuration that takes the form of two patterns. Moreover, our study shows that, in the legal context, the temporal dimension of the present tense in the three languages remains in the background while another dimension, i.e. modal, comes to the fore.