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.