scholarly journals STAGES OF LEGAL DISCOURSE DEVELOPMENT IN LINGUISTICS

2021 ◽  
pp. 113-135

Although the term ‘discourse’ has been defined by many researchers in linguistics, it still remains an abstract concept. This is because there are different views on discourse and text, discourse and language, and discourse and speech oppositions, and the study of this problem in linguistics is of a particular importance. Besides linguistics, ‘discourse’ is also studied in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and other fields as the primary research object of social theories. And this requires an interdisciplinary study of this issue. Today discourse is considered in the framework of Forensic linguistics, which connects jurisprudence and linguistics, and the disclosure of the linguistic and extralinguistic features of legal discourse is one of the main goals and objectives of this field. Institutional discourse, which differs from colloquial discourse in terms of direction, speech constraints, structure, purpose, and other characteristics, it is divided into political, administrative, religious, advertising, and other subtypes. Legal discourse, which is a type of institutional discourse, manifests itself as a statutory institutional dialogue and involves its participants, namely the judge-defendant-lawyer-prosecutor- witness, and so on. This article defines legal discourse as the object of research, and before the author writes about the development of this discourse, she describes the use of discourse as a linguistic term, its typology, legal discourse, and its peculiarities. Moreover, the research article examines the English and Uzbek legal discourse within specific periods and provides the legal language and terms that are actively employed in each period. The study aims to compare the periodic formation of the English and Uzbek legal discourse, as well as to present the changes and differences in the legal language and terminology over the centuries and to illustrate them with examples. To this end, the opinions of various linguists and lawyers, and many historical sources have been provided and scientifically substantiated.

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaakko Husa

AbstractThis article examines the complicated legal-cultural process in which Roman law became Byzantine law and Roman legal discourse altered into Byzantine legal discourse. Roman law’s transformation into Early Byzantine law is analysed from the point of view of legal language which mutated from Latin to Greek. The approach is legal cultural and legal linguistic and focuses on the overall shape and general patterns. The goal is to highlight how legal-cultural transformation was incremental, language-bound and that there was no radical or sudden culmination point. Moreover, the analysis answers generally to the question of why sixth-century Byzantine legislative Greek contained frequent Latin loans, expressions, phrases and distortions. The discussion concentrates on the Novellae as an integral part of the process of legal cultural and linguistic change from Roman to Byzantine. Instead of going into detailed linguistic analysis, this article underlines generally the contextuality of law and the importance of legal culture


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Crespo

Forensic Linguistics is the analysis of the language which is related to law, either as evidence or as legal discourse. Authorship attribution is the task of identifying the author of a document when the language is used as evidence in a courtroom, so it will be of interest to police investigators and the wider judicial process. Recent advances in Forensic Linguistics are related to the analysis of texts coming from emails, social networks and messages coming from mobile phones. This work continues previous research and explores how different classification algorithms, the size of the text and the type of linguistic feature used in authorship attribution may affect the results in the authorship attribution of Spanish short messages on online forums. Important differences in precision have been assessed when varying both the size of the texts investigated and the algorithms used for classification.


Law in Common ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 213-240
Author(s):  
Tom Johnson

This chapter explores the growing use of English as a written ‘legal vernacular’ over the course of the fifteenth century. It argues that one can only understand the emergence of vernacular writing in legal discourse by looking to the local contexts of legal production. The emergence of English as a legal vernacular did not take hold uniformly across late-medieval society, and so we need to think more carefully about the specific kinds of discursive value that it held; the chapter argues that, as a legal language, English worked as a signifier of authenticity, a mode of signalling fidelity to real speech, and as a way of gesturing towards wider audiences or publics. This leads to the third argument that the growing significance granted to English as a legal language affected common people in late-medieval England in ambivalent ways. While in some ways the processes of vernacularization in the fifteenth century seem to follow a trajectory towards a more inclusive public discourse, as the ‘common tongue’ spoken by the majority of the populace became a language appropriate for expressing ideas about legitimacy, it was ultimately constrained by the relatively limited modes in which English was allowed to be legal.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tofan Dwi Hardjanto

Because of its important role in the advancement of science, attempts have been made to investigate research article abstracts in terms of both their discourse patterning and their linguistic characteristics. This research is an attempt to examine their rhetorical patterning. More specifically, it addresses the questions what common discourse patterns research article abstracts have and whether abstracts from different disciplines show different patterns. The research corpus contained 50 research article abstracts collected from five international journals published in the fields of biology, engineering, linguistics, medicine and physics. The data were analyzed using a four-move abstract structure developed by Hardjanto (1997). The results showed that Moves 1, 3 and 4 were found in most abstracts, and were, therefore, considered as obligatory moves in the abstracts. The most common pattern was found to be a pattern containing all the four moves in the order of 1-2-3-4, especially in abstracts from medicine and linguistics. Another common pattern was a 1-3-4 pattern, found especially in abstracts from biology and physics, whereas abstracts from engineering did not show any preference for a specific pattern even though 40% of them had a 1-2-3-4 pattern. These results suggest that there is a significant disciplinary variation in English research article abstract patterning.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Patrizia Anesa

English is de facto reinforcing its role as the language of international legal communication. Indeed, while different national languages continue to play a crucial role in the definition, the execution, and the application of the law, English is increasingly employed by non-native legal professionals worldwide. Thus, this study focuses on the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in legal settings and aims to offer considerations towards the conceptualization of Legal English as a Lingua Franca (LELF). As English is considered a global asset in legal communication, it is argued that a finer problematization of LELF is imperative. In this respect, the study also discusses whether it is possible to apply the concept of a lingua franca to legal language tout court or whether the distinctive features of legal discourse across systems make the definition of LELF inapplicable from a conceptual perspective. This article also offers a reflection on the main concerns which arise regarding the widespread use of English in legal settings, especially in the light of the specificities of different legal systems, legal cultures and communities of practice. Thus, all stakeholders involved should adopt a more reflexive approach in order to go beyond the unproblematic acceptance of LELF across legal settings and to be more aware of the implications and consequences that its usage entails.


Author(s):  
Kawa Abdulkareem Sherwani, Et. al.

Between 1979 and 2003, when Baath party was in power in Iraq, minorities were neglected and were not part of the decision-making process. It was the priority of the new government that other components of Iraq where part of the process. The draft of the constitution of2005, in a number of provisions, do mention all the Iraqi components. However, no law has been passed to protect the rights of minorities and there is lack of appropriate mechanism to bring perpetrators to justice once violations have been committed against them. The data is taken from the English version of the Iraqi Constitution. The principles of critical discourse analysis areused as method to deconstruct the legal language of the constitution. This research undertakes a critical analysis of the legal discourseof the Iraqi Constitution and examines the provision of the constitution to highlight whether minorities in Iraq are protected under the constitution and whether the legal language of the constitutionis drafted in a way that is not vague or ambiguous to guarantee that protection. It is an attempt to investigate the legal language of Iraqi Constitution critically. The study concludes that the constitution was written in a way that may allow different interpretations, that is why it is difficult to be implemented with the available mechanisms. The study recommends that the constitution should be amended in a way that is inclusive of all minorities in Iraq and the provisions represent the quality between and among all the Iraqi components


MANUSYA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 60-69
Author(s):  
Sorabud Rungrojsuwan

Accuracy is an issue that points to the reliability of language used in legal circles. The objective of the present study is to investigate linguistic devices denoting accuracy in Thai legal discourse. Data was gathered from judgments in three Thai courts: the Supreme Court, the Supreme Administrative Court and the Constitutional Court. Findings from Thai legal language were also compared to those from three registers: academic, media and political. The results show that Thai legal language employs two major linguistic devices in order to express accuracy: mention of the sources of evidence and legal citations. The use of the two devices is significantly present in legal language when compared with other registers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 220-228
Author(s):  
A. L. Dedinkin

The article introduces legal discourse as part of a complex communicative activity. It is an integrative interdisciplinary phenomenon on the border of jurisprudence and linguistics. The research objective was to establish the constituent parts of legal discourse, which includes legal texts, related scientific literature, and other documents. Legal linguistics is a generalizing discipline that studies the interaction of language and law. The line between legal discourse and other discourses is hard to define. Legal discourse is characterized by unified subjects, procedures, circumstances, and impersonality, that is, the absence of recipient and sender, hence the abundance of impersonal verb forms and impersonal constructions. Legal texts are devoid of national marks, and the vocabulary has equivalents in other languages. The present research was the first to designate a set of texts that make up legal discourse, i.e. texts of laws, decrees, scientific literature on legal matters, various legal documents, judicial texts, texts of interrogations, court speeches, expert opinion, etc. Although legal discourse and legal linguistics have different subjects and tasks, they share the same object, i.e. the interaction of language and law. Legal linguistics is an integrative science based on linguistics and legal theory, which uses achievements of philosophy, psychology, sociology, ethics, cognitive linguistics, pragmalinguistics, linguistic conflictology, etc.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-183
Author(s):  
Alfin Zalicha Hilmi ◽  
Toyyibah Toyyibah ◽  
Nur Afifi

This study aimed at: 1) investigating the move and steps found in quantitative and qualitative research articles discussion; 2) investigating the rhetoric structure patterns of quantitative and qualitative research article discussion. This study is a qualitative-research focusing on genre analysis on qualitative and quantitative RA discussions. There were 20 qualitative and 20 quantitative research article discussions of EFL and applied linguistics journals were investigated in this research. Using Yang & Allison’s (2003) framework to analyze the data, it is found that all moves in the framework were employed in RA discussion of both qualitative and quantitative research. However, the number of occurrences of each move were different between discussion section of these two different approaches. Furthermore, the patterns of both qualitative and quantitative RA discussion was not significantly different. There were two types of patterns in RA discussion both in qualitative and quantitative, repetitive pattern and organized pattern. although there were some variations in each of those patterns. The present study provides more evidence of generic structure of RA discussion section as well as proposes some useful insights related to move analysis on research article discussion in ELT and Linguistics area. Limitations and recommendations are discussed in this study.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 72
Author(s):  
Tofan Dwi Hardjanto

Because of its important role in the advancement of science, attempts have been made to investigate research article abstracts in terms of both their discourse patterning and their linguistic characteristics. This research is an attempt to examine their rhetorical patterning. More specifically, it addresses the questions what common discourse patterns research article abstracts have and whether abstracts from different disciplines show different patterns. The research corpus contained 50 research article abstracts collected from five international journals published in the fields of biology, engineering, linguistics, medicine and physics. The data were analyzed using a four-move abstract structure developed by Hardjanto (1997). The results showed that Moves 1, 3 and 4 were found in most abstracts, and were, therefore, considered as obligatory moves in the abstracts. The most common pattern was found to be a pattern containing all the four moves in the order of 1-2-3-4, especially in abstracts from medicine and linguistics. Another common pattern was a 1-3-4 pattern, found especially in abstracts from biology and physics, whereas abstracts from engineering did not show any preference for a specific pattern even though 40% of them had a 1-2-3-4 pattern. These results suggest that there is a significant disciplinary variation in English research article abstract patterning.


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