Negotiating Agency and Constraint: Analysis of Dynamic Modality in Kenyan County Assembly Debates

County Assembly debates provide a rich site for examining how language constructs institutional authority, negotiates accountability, and represents agency in Kenya’s devolved governance system. While political discourse research has focused predominantly on epistemic and deontic modality, dynamic modality remains comparatively underexplored, particularly in subnational legislative contexts particularly. This study investigates how dynamic modality functions as a sema-pragmatic resource for negotiating agency and constraint in Kenyan County Assembly debates, drawing on Kratzer’s Contextual Dependency Theory and Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. Using a mixed-methods explanatory sequential design, the study analysed 579 Hansard reports (Kisii = 268, Nairobi = 183, Isiolo = 128), comprising 3,097,238 word tokens from the First County Assemblies (2013–2017). The counties were purposively selected to represent contrasting rural, urban, and arid socio-political contexts. Modal expressions were identified using AntConc and manually classified by modal type and dynamic strength. Quantitative analysis established the distribution of dynamic modality, while qualitative analysis examined its contextual functions in legislative debate. The findings revealed that modal auxiliaries and semi-modals, particularly “can”, “will”, and “going to”, were the predominant realizations of dynamic modality. High dynamic modality accounted for 83.6% of all instances, compared with 13.9% for median and 2.5% for low dynamic modality. High dynamic forms projected assertive institutional agency through strong expressions of capability and commitment, whereas median and low forms reflected negotiated and constrained agency shaped by procedural institutional, and contextual realities. The study demonstrates that dynamic modality functions as a strategic sema-pragmatic resource and a continuum of agency through which MCAs negotiate institutional action. By foregrounding dynamic modality in legislative discourse, the study extends modality research beyond its predominant focus on epistemic and deontic modality and provides a framework for understanding how agency is linguistically enacted in devolved legislative governance and comparable multi-level democratic contexts.

Dynamic modality, sema-pragmatics, legislative discourse, institutional agency

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