Legal languages are inevitably products of the history of the nation or state in which they are used, as well as the peculiar developments of the legal system in question. In terms of features, they tend to be characterized by minor differences in spelling, pronunciation, and orthography; long and complex sentences, often containing conjoined phrases or lists, as well as passive and nominal constructions; and a large and distinct lexicon. The profession has developed distinct traditions on how its language should be interpreted. In terms of style, the language of the law is often archaic, formal, impersonal, and wordy or redundant. And it can be relatively precise, or quite general or vague, depending on the strategic objectives of the drafter.
Increasing globalisation has led to English becoming the lingua franca of international legal practice requiring L2 legal professionals to develop high level skills in English thus creating significant challenges for language educators who may not have a background in law. This article provides an overview of language education for L2 legal professionals. Developments and practice in English for Legal Purposes (ELP) viewed within English for Specific Purposes (ESP) are presented to provide a model focusing on the interrelated dimensions of learner context, methodology and teacher background. I acknowledge the contribution of genre studies in providing pedagogical descriptions of written legal language and stress the need for further ethnographic investigation to identify and describe relevant oral legal genres.
Systems of justice based on lay juries are meant to ensure a close link between the law and the community it serves: jurors represent the values of the community and these are fed back into the legal system. However, juries can only arrive at legally fair decisions if they have managed to understand and apply the law relating to the case. Yet legal systems in common law countries have paid scant attention to whether legal instructions delivered by the judge are actually conveyed effectively to the jury. This chapter considers the process of jury instruction from linguistic and communicational perspectives. It draws a key distinction between ‘jury instructions’, or the legal texts produced by judicial committees and delivered by judges, and ‘jury instruction’, or the process of communicating the relevant law to a specific jury in the context of a specifictrial. While the comprehension of specific instructions can be improved by rewriting them in plain English, the overall process of instruction requires much more radical revision if we want to ensure that lay juries will bring in true and just verdicts which reflect both the law and the values of the community.
This chapter focuses on the spoken language of police communication or “policespeak”. It examines a number of the readily recognisable clichés and formulaic expressions that are widely regarded as characteristic of policespeak. It also looks at some facets of police work which promote specific behaviours which are less overtly characteristic of policespeak but are nonetheless strongly motivated by the demands of their contexts of use. The final portion of the chapter shows how policespeak is used as means of accommodation by interactants who are not police officers. In addressing policespeak from these various angles, the chapter attempts where possible and practical to address the contextual factors motivating the observed behaviours.
This paper tries to discuss some of the problems arising in the translation of legal English. In most analyses of legal translation, vocabulary (and terminology) has justifiably received most attention, as lexis fulfills the symbolic or representational function of language better than any other linguistic component. Although this article examines some problems in the translation of legal vocabulary, especially through the concept of anisomorphism, it makes an attempt to deal with the snags of syntax in legal translation, by means of the concept of anfractuosity, particularly in repetition, thematisation, passivissation and nominalisation.
Questions in everyday discourse consist of a situated exchange in which the questioner and answerer are in a roughly symmetrical relationship in which each is entitled to request information from the other. Questioners typically do not have the information that they are requesting. The answerer is not obliged to answer, but there is a normal Gricean expectation that the answer will provide the information requested. Courtroom questioning differs markedly, in that lawyers usually have a particular version of events in mind that they are attempting to confirm with the witness. Usually witnesses are compelled to answer, and do not have the right to ask questions. Therefore courtroom questions differ from everyday questions in both their social and their information characteristics.
These differences mean that courtroom questions are different from everyday questions along a range of linguistic parameters. At the overall narrative or spoken text level, the lawyer is constructing a version of events element by element – neither he nor the witness normally provides a full narrative during the interaction. At the exchange level, normally only the lawyer asks questions, and only the witness answers questions – an asymmetrical pattern – and evaluative lawyer third parts are common. At the level of question structure, coercive grammatical forms are strongly over-represented when compared to everyday conversation.
Bilingual courtrooms are generally associated with the use of interpreted oral testimony to support monolingual judicial proceedings. Yet several postcolonial jurisdictions accord de jure or de facto standing to more than one language in court. The most studied is Malaysia, but the literature is far from exhaustive. Further research is to be encouraged because the way different legal systems accommodate bilingualism throws light on many questions central to forensic linguistics, including language rights, language planning in legal domains, cultural disadvantage before the law, genre-based communication strategies, and transparency of legal processes. This chapter reviews current evidence of and research into bilingual courtrooms and discusses the problems and potential benefits of including data on bilingual discourse in debates about language and justice.
The Israeli Supreme Court has changed its decisions several times concerning the evidence of the silent witness in criminal cases, focusing on the interpretation of section 10a of the 1971 Evidence Ordinance – whether or not to admit as testimony what the witness has told the police if the witness is silent on the stand. The article will analyze the judicial opinions of the majority and minority sides of the bench in the 1991 Haj Yehia case. The majority opinion, which decided to accept such out-of-court evidence, may be considered to be pragmatic: meaning derives both from the words and from the purpose of the text. The approach of the minority derives from a more literal interpretation of the law.
This chapter draws on sociolinguistic research to examine some social groups whose experience of disadvantage in the legal process is at least partly due to differences in language use: children, intellectually disabled people, Deaf people, and second dialect speakers and other minority group members. The legal contexts include police interviews, courtroom hearings, lawyer-client interviews and alternative legal processes. The chapter argues that it is impossible to address language and disadvantage in the law – whether through research or law reform – without an understanding of the politics of disadvantage, and the rights of people whose difference from the dominant society plays a significant role in their participation in the legal process.
Legal interpreting is more than a service provided to linguistic minorities who do not speak Cantonese (the majority language in Hong Kong), sometimes English interpreting is also a mechanism and establishment to maintain control, by retaining former colonial practices. Despite expectation of change in the legal field in Hong Kong after it was handed back to Mainland China, this study reveals that legal interpreting as a means of providing the linguistic human right to have access to court is a myth that is perpetuated in the still intellectually colonized city.
This chapter demonstrates diversity in the activity of authorship and the corresponding diversity of forensic authorship analysis questions and techniques. Authorship is discussed in terms of Love’s (2002) multifunctional description of precursory, executive, declarative and revisionary authorship activities and the implications of this distinction for forensic problem solving. Four different authorship questions are considered. These are ‘How was the text produced?’, ‘How many people wrote the text?’, ‘What kind of person wrote the text?’ and ‘What is the relationship of a queried text with comparison texts?’ Different approaches to forensic authorship analysis are discussed in terms of their appropriateness to answering different authorship questions. The conclusion drawn is that no one technique will ever be appropriate to all problems.
Especially in North America, trademark litigation constitutes a prominent area of applied linguistics. As legal consultants, linguists bring their professional expertise to bear upon three issues: (1) likelihood of confusion of two marks; (2) categorization of the strength of a mark with respect to its place on a continuum of semantic/pragmatic categories technically labeled “generic,” “descriptive,” “suggestive,” “fanciful,” and “arbitrary”; and (3) propriety of a mark, that is, whether it is “scandalous,” or “disparaging.” Consulting linguists typically write descriptive reports that analyze the linguistic facts underlying the issues of particular cases – sometimes in rebuttal to other linguists’ reports. Often, linguists are also called upon to give sworn testimony based upon the reports they have prepared.
This chapter attempts to explore the following multipart research question: What, if anything, can linguistics and linguists offer: (1) in defining deception and fraud, (2) in detecting deception and fraud, and (3) in providing assistance to the various entities involved in legal systems with respect to the nature and detection of deception and fraud? After defining deception and fraud from lay, linguistics and legal perspectives, we explore the linguistic elements of the Nigerian Advanced Fee Fraud in order to see how linguistic knowledge can be used to detect deceptive language. We then critique research aimed at using linguistics to detect deception in real-time contexts. We conclude by offering ways linguistic science can be legitimately employed to uncover deceptive and fraudulent language.
The negative connotations of plagiarism as an illegal appropriation of ideas are based on the concept of Intellectual Property. Although Intellectual Property Laws in most countries around the world are specific as to the characterisation of plagiarism as an offence, the extent of plagiarism litigation varies enormously and this variation has a lot to do with the way writers, whose texts are plagiarised, and plagiarists themselves, view the act of being plagiarised or the act of plagiarising somebody else’s text. In countries which fall within the Common Law tradition such as the United Sates, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, plagiarism litigation is extensive and there is a regular offer of linguistic expertise to solve plagiarism disputes. In countries within the Civil Law tradition, like Spain, for example, linguists are still rarely called upon as expert witnesses in plagiarism cases.
Plagiarism is multidimensional, as is proved in the number of areas of knowledge affected by it (including literature in all its forms: essay, novel, theatre, poetry), the settings and activities in which it occurs (education, translation), and the contexts in which it is produced (for example, the scope of plagiarism on the Internet is twofold since one can plagiarise directly from the web or use the web as a method to detect plagiarism). As expert witnesses, linguists are frequently asked to give evidence in court to help to decide cases of plagiarism of ideas, linguistic plagiarism, or both. In the first case, the distinction between author’s rights and copyright may be useful, because these two concepts and terms are used differently in different judicial systems. In the second case, it may be important for linguists to come up with theoretical and methodological proposals that help them as legal consultants to find linguistic markers and discourse strategies that will be decisive in plagiarism detection, as well as in establishing prima facie cases. As in any other forensic linguistics contexts, plagiarism is an area where the need to incorporate internal and external validity to the experts’ findings is strongly felt. When giving opinions in court, it has been proven that both qualitative and quantitative approaches to plagiarism detection are valid and complementary, and also that both semantically and statistically expressed opinions may be necessary.
Legal languages are inevitably products of the history of the nation or state in which they are used, as well as the peculiar developments of the legal system in question. In terms of features, they tend to be characterized by minor differences in spelling, pronunciation, and orthography; long and complex sentences, often containing conjoined phrases or lists, as well as passive and nominal constructions; and a large and distinct lexicon. The profession has developed distinct traditions on how its language should be interpreted. In terms of style, the language of the law is often archaic, formal, impersonal, and wordy or redundant. And it can be relatively precise, or quite general or vague, depending on the strategic objectives of the drafter.
Increasing globalisation has led to English becoming the lingua franca of international legal practice requiring L2 legal professionals to develop high level skills in English thus creating significant challenges for language educators who may not have a background in law. This article provides an overview of language education for L2 legal professionals. Developments and practice in English for Legal Purposes (ELP) viewed within English for Specific Purposes (ESP) are presented to provide a model focusing on the interrelated dimensions of learner context, methodology and teacher background. I acknowledge the contribution of genre studies in providing pedagogical descriptions of written legal language and stress the need for further ethnographic investigation to identify and describe relevant oral legal genres.
Systems of justice based on lay juries are meant to ensure a close link between the law and the community it serves: jurors represent the values of the community and these are fed back into the legal system. However, juries can only arrive at legally fair decisions if they have managed to understand and apply the law relating to the case. Yet legal systems in common law countries have paid scant attention to whether legal instructions delivered by the judge are actually conveyed effectively to the jury. This chapter considers the process of jury instruction from linguistic and communicational perspectives. It draws a key distinction between ‘jury instructions’, or the legal texts produced by judicial committees and delivered by judges, and ‘jury instruction’, or the process of communicating the relevant law to a specific jury in the context of a specifictrial. While the comprehension of specific instructions can be improved by rewriting them in plain English, the overall process of instruction requires much more radical revision if we want to ensure that lay juries will bring in true and just verdicts which reflect both the law and the values of the community.
This chapter focuses on the spoken language of police communication or “policespeak”. It examines a number of the readily recognisable clichés and formulaic expressions that are widely regarded as characteristic of policespeak. It also looks at some facets of police work which promote specific behaviours which are less overtly characteristic of policespeak but are nonetheless strongly motivated by the demands of their contexts of use. The final portion of the chapter shows how policespeak is used as means of accommodation by interactants who are not police officers. In addressing policespeak from these various angles, the chapter attempts where possible and practical to address the contextual factors motivating the observed behaviours.
This paper tries to discuss some of the problems arising in the translation of legal English. In most analyses of legal translation, vocabulary (and terminology) has justifiably received most attention, as lexis fulfills the symbolic or representational function of language better than any other linguistic component. Although this article examines some problems in the translation of legal vocabulary, especially through the concept of anisomorphism, it makes an attempt to deal with the snags of syntax in legal translation, by means of the concept of anfractuosity, particularly in repetition, thematisation, passivissation and nominalisation.
Questions in everyday discourse consist of a situated exchange in which the questioner and answerer are in a roughly symmetrical relationship in which each is entitled to request information from the other. Questioners typically do not have the information that they are requesting. The answerer is not obliged to answer, but there is a normal Gricean expectation that the answer will provide the information requested. Courtroom questioning differs markedly, in that lawyers usually have a particular version of events in mind that they are attempting to confirm with the witness. Usually witnesses are compelled to answer, and do not have the right to ask questions. Therefore courtroom questions differ from everyday questions in both their social and their information characteristics.
These differences mean that courtroom questions are different from everyday questions along a range of linguistic parameters. At the overall narrative or spoken text level, the lawyer is constructing a version of events element by element – neither he nor the witness normally provides a full narrative during the interaction. At the exchange level, normally only the lawyer asks questions, and only the witness answers questions – an asymmetrical pattern – and evaluative lawyer third parts are common. At the level of question structure, coercive grammatical forms are strongly over-represented when compared to everyday conversation.
Bilingual courtrooms are generally associated with the use of interpreted oral testimony to support monolingual judicial proceedings. Yet several postcolonial jurisdictions accord de jure or de facto standing to more than one language in court. The most studied is Malaysia, but the literature is far from exhaustive. Further research is to be encouraged because the way different legal systems accommodate bilingualism throws light on many questions central to forensic linguistics, including language rights, language planning in legal domains, cultural disadvantage before the law, genre-based communication strategies, and transparency of legal processes. This chapter reviews current evidence of and research into bilingual courtrooms and discusses the problems and potential benefits of including data on bilingual discourse in debates about language and justice.
The Israeli Supreme Court has changed its decisions several times concerning the evidence of the silent witness in criminal cases, focusing on the interpretation of section 10a of the 1971 Evidence Ordinance – whether or not to admit as testimony what the witness has told the police if the witness is silent on the stand. The article will analyze the judicial opinions of the majority and minority sides of the bench in the 1991 Haj Yehia case. The majority opinion, which decided to accept such out-of-court evidence, may be considered to be pragmatic: meaning derives both from the words and from the purpose of the text. The approach of the minority derives from a more literal interpretation of the law.
This chapter draws on sociolinguistic research to examine some social groups whose experience of disadvantage in the legal process is at least partly due to differences in language use: children, intellectually disabled people, Deaf people, and second dialect speakers and other minority group members. The legal contexts include police interviews, courtroom hearings, lawyer-client interviews and alternative legal processes. The chapter argues that it is impossible to address language and disadvantage in the law – whether through research or law reform – without an understanding of the politics of disadvantage, and the rights of people whose difference from the dominant society plays a significant role in their participation in the legal process.
Legal interpreting is more than a service provided to linguistic minorities who do not speak Cantonese (the majority language in Hong Kong), sometimes English interpreting is also a mechanism and establishment to maintain control, by retaining former colonial practices. Despite expectation of change in the legal field in Hong Kong after it was handed back to Mainland China, this study reveals that legal interpreting as a means of providing the linguistic human right to have access to court is a myth that is perpetuated in the still intellectually colonized city.
This chapter demonstrates diversity in the activity of authorship and the corresponding diversity of forensic authorship analysis questions and techniques. Authorship is discussed in terms of Love’s (2002) multifunctional description of precursory, executive, declarative and revisionary authorship activities and the implications of this distinction for forensic problem solving. Four different authorship questions are considered. These are ‘How was the text produced?’, ‘How many people wrote the text?’, ‘What kind of person wrote the text?’ and ‘What is the relationship of a queried text with comparison texts?’ Different approaches to forensic authorship analysis are discussed in terms of their appropriateness to answering different authorship questions. The conclusion drawn is that no one technique will ever be appropriate to all problems.
Especially in North America, trademark litigation constitutes a prominent area of applied linguistics. As legal consultants, linguists bring their professional expertise to bear upon three issues: (1) likelihood of confusion of two marks; (2) categorization of the strength of a mark with respect to its place on a continuum of semantic/pragmatic categories technically labeled “generic,” “descriptive,” “suggestive,” “fanciful,” and “arbitrary”; and (3) propriety of a mark, that is, whether it is “scandalous,” or “disparaging.” Consulting linguists typically write descriptive reports that analyze the linguistic facts underlying the issues of particular cases – sometimes in rebuttal to other linguists’ reports. Often, linguists are also called upon to give sworn testimony based upon the reports they have prepared.
This chapter attempts to explore the following multipart research question: What, if anything, can linguistics and linguists offer: (1) in defining deception and fraud, (2) in detecting deception and fraud, and (3) in providing assistance to the various entities involved in legal systems with respect to the nature and detection of deception and fraud? After defining deception and fraud from lay, linguistics and legal perspectives, we explore the linguistic elements of the Nigerian Advanced Fee Fraud in order to see how linguistic knowledge can be used to detect deceptive language. We then critique research aimed at using linguistics to detect deception in real-time contexts. We conclude by offering ways linguistic science can be legitimately employed to uncover deceptive and fraudulent language.
The negative connotations of plagiarism as an illegal appropriation of ideas are based on the concept of Intellectual Property. Although Intellectual Property Laws in most countries around the world are specific as to the characterisation of plagiarism as an offence, the extent of plagiarism litigation varies enormously and this variation has a lot to do with the way writers, whose texts are plagiarised, and plagiarists themselves, view the act of being plagiarised or the act of plagiarising somebody else’s text. In countries which fall within the Common Law tradition such as the United Sates, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, plagiarism litigation is extensive and there is a regular offer of linguistic expertise to solve plagiarism disputes. In countries within the Civil Law tradition, like Spain, for example, linguists are still rarely called upon as expert witnesses in plagiarism cases.
Plagiarism is multidimensional, as is proved in the number of areas of knowledge affected by it (including literature in all its forms: essay, novel, theatre, poetry), the settings and activities in which it occurs (education, translation), and the contexts in which it is produced (for example, the scope of plagiarism on the Internet is twofold since one can plagiarise directly from the web or use the web as a method to detect plagiarism). As expert witnesses, linguists are frequently asked to give evidence in court to help to decide cases of plagiarism of ideas, linguistic plagiarism, or both. In the first case, the distinction between author’s rights and copyright may be useful, because these two concepts and terms are used differently in different judicial systems. In the second case, it may be important for linguists to come up with theoretical and methodological proposals that help them as legal consultants to find linguistic markers and discourse strategies that will be decisive in plagiarism detection, as well as in establishing prima facie cases. As in any other forensic linguistics contexts, plagiarism is an area where the need to incorporate internal and external validity to the experts’ findings is strongly felt. When giving opinions in court, it has been proven that both qualitative and quantitative approaches to plagiarism detection are valid and complementary, and also that both semantically and statistically expressed opinions may be necessary.