Memoranda of understanding, letters of intent and contracts: An analysis of speech acts

The aim of this paper is to explore the differences in the use of modals to create illocutionary acts considering three legal genres, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the Letter of Intent (LoI) and the contract. On the one hand, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is an agreement that has hardly been investigated in the existing literature and it is used to establish cooperation in research and in academic/cultural activities between universities. On the other hand, the Letter of Intent is a genre generally used in corporate communication that precedes the MoU in the development of joint research nets. The MoU can be considered as a specific type of contract, thus our research questions are: what are the most significant differences in modal realization among the MoU the LoI and corporate contracts? Are illocutionary acts genres-bound? In particular, thestudy sets out to explore the use of speech acts. Therefore, it focuses on regulative patterns considering the rhetorical functions of directive and commissive acts (Trosborg 1995) in this legal genre. The analysis is based on a corpus of MoUs signed by Anglophone universities (UK – US – AUS). The results obtained are then compared to those of two comparable corpora of contracts and of Letters of Intent (LoI) in order to show differences and similarities in the patterns observed. From a methodological point of view, the study integrates corpus linguistics and discourse analytical perspectives in the investigation of textual data, relying on both qualitative and quantitative analysis. A combination of computational analysis and manual tagging is employed to select all the relevant regulative speech acts in the corpus. Results show that the MoU is a “hybrid genre” (Bhatia 2004), an instance of “interdiscursive colonisation” (Bhatia 2011: 106) in which the directive component of the contract is combined with the commissive one of the Letter of Intent.