The present paper aims to identify the deontic modal

expressions in Shabaki and to describe their semantic interpretations

and means of expression. The corpus is based on the data excerpted

from everyday communication. They were observed to fall into two

types: directives (deontic possibility, deontic necessity, prohibition,

advice and recommendation) and commissives (promises and

threats). They were also categorized along formality and politeness

scales. These expressions in Shabaki cover a very wide range of

deontic meaning. Formally, they regularly tend to appear at the

beginning of the Shabaki sentence.

KEY WORDS:

Shabaki, modality, event, deontic, directives,

commissive