Legal discourse has numerous linguistic features that make it of a special nature. While legal documents attempt to achieve certain aims, such as objectivity and obligation, such aims can be realized in different ways by different languages. This paper aims to reveal the linguistic features of written legal discourse in terms of obligation, permission and prohibition. These features are detected on both English and Arabic legal documents. The paper also aims to show the similarities and differences between English and Arabic through the analysis of selected sentences from the corpus of legal documents under examination. Following the descriptive analysis and with the use of quantitive approach, the linguistic features of the legal language of both English and Arabic is analyzed individually, then the similarities and differences between both languages is discussed. One of the major concerns of this paper is deontic modality and the way it functions in legal language.
