Unequal discourse and the role of modality in the language of invitations for bids.

International business transactions are characterized by a number of official documents which accompany them from start to finish. Most of these documents have received consistent scholarly attention, with the exception of invitations for bids (IFBs). Using a corpus of 16 IFBs (45,480 words), we have analysed the different types of modal forms contained in the documents. Secondly, we have investigated the pragmatic use of these modals to see if and to what extent they contribute to what Barbara / Scott (1999) have termed ‘unequal discourse’. Data show that SHALL, the most frequent central modal in the corpus, is employed in a variety of pragmatic uses, such as to confer rights, to impose a duty/an obligation, to negate an obligation and to express prohibition as in legal or quasi-legal language. The data also indicate that deontic SHALL is more frequent with the bidder as animate subject and this is in line with Barbara and Scott’s findings, but these data also suggest that when SHALL is used to confer rights it is employed with both the bidder and the purchaser as animate subjects, which marks a difference with the findings of Barbara and Scott.
Moreover, other central modals, such as WILL, MAY, SHOULD, MUST and CAN, contribute to the definition of the relationship between the buyer and the bidder, though the different incidence of these modals seems to suggest company-specific, if not culture-specific, variations governing pragmatic appropriateness within this text type.