Author Archives: langcorp

Compatibility of syntactic features of legal and plain English

The research explores the compatibility of syntactic characteristics of legal English and plain English. The paper analyses the competition of linguistic means of expression between plain English and legal English. To this end, the paper (1) explores the characteristics of legal writing and identifies syntactic features that cause comprehension problems; (2) analyses syntactic features and means of expression of plain English; (3) investigates the
compatibility of the requirements for plain English with the characteristics of legal English.

The research is based on the Treaty of Lisbon. The findings prove that although formal requirements for legal English are compatible with the requirements for plain English, there is a great difference between the means of expression of the two variations. Nevertheless, plain English principles allow appropriate user-friendly syntactic competitors for most complicated cases of syntax in legal writing.

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#CFP Yale Fictional Discourse in Legal Theory and Practice

Through the Forensic-Linguistics list

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After three years of fruitful collaboration, the Yale WHCWG “Fictionality: Law. Literature. Science. Interdisciplinary Approaches’ invites presentation proposals (25 minute presentation) for its concluding conference on May 20/21, 2015 at Yale University, New Haven, CT. A selection of the conference’s papers will also be edited and published.

The keynote address will be given by Prof. Peter Brooks (Princeton/Georgetown Law).

The Conference will consist of two whole-day panels: one very specific on the role of Fictional Discourse in Legal Theory and Practice, and a second more open panel on the intersections and relations of Law and Fiction in general (a more traditional law and literature session) that is open to inquiries of all sorts. Each session will also have a session keynote, the speakers (Yale Law School Faculty) are still unconfirmed but will be determined shortly.

This Call for Paper is only for the FIRST SESSION (‘FICTIONAL DISCOURSE IN LEGAL THEORY AND PRACTICE’)- a separate Call for Papers will be posted for Session 2 (“Law and Fiction”).

This whole-day session will address the question of fiction in law from theoretical and dogmatic standpoints. What function and form may have fictions in the legal world? What parts do they play in legal codifications, in trials or as part of legal thinking and legal theory? Questions of the relations of Law to Reality in general are as welcome as more specific enquiries (eg. the nature and purpose of the fictio iuris).

Papers could address:

– Fictions as part of laws and codes / Fictional quality of Laws, legal examples, etc.

– Questions of legal semiotics (Truth, Reality of the Law, legal concepts etc.); Law and Language

– Question of Legal Interpretation and the search for a fixed or variable “truth” (Originalism, etc.)

– The nature and the reality of the Law

– Law as Literature

– Law as Fiction (LaRue, etc.)

– Fictions as part of trials and investigation (eg. the story of the case as a fictional construct)

– Fiction(s) as part of legal thinking

– Fiction(s) as part of legal instruction

– Relations of Law and Reality

– The question and nature of the fictio juris/ fictio legis (legal fiction)

– Historical or theoretical inquiries (e.g. Benthams Theory of Fiction, Locke, Fuller, etc.)

– Reception and application of philosophical theories /literary theory on truth and fiction in the field of law (John Searle, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Michael Riffaterre, Niklas Luhmann, Gregory Bateson, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Heinz von Foerster, Roman Ingarden, Gans, Gottfried Gabriel, Marie-Laure Ryan, Wolfgang Iser)

– Deconstruction and the Law

– Constructivism and the Law

– Neuroscience and the Law

Please send a short abstract of maximum 500 words (single spaced) and short academic resume (not more than 5 lines) that need to be both put on one SINGE PAGE, preferably as PDF, to hans.lind@yale.edu The Email Subject needs to be: ‘Session 1 CFP’ followed by your lastname and the title of your proposal (for automatic filtering purposes).

The deadline is March 30, due to the tight timeframe however, early submissions might have a higher chance to get accepted.

Hans Lind, Ph.D.
Email: hans.lind@yale.edu

Representing migrants in the UK and Italian press (Taylor, 2014)

 

Taylor, C. (2014) Investigating the representation of migrants in the UK and Italian press: A cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse analysis.International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 19(3), 368-400.

This paper is a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study of the representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press and it adopts a two-stage methodological approach. In the first phase, the number of references to nationalities which collocate with refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants (and Italian equivalents) are calculated and this information is subsequently used to identify any ‘mismatch’ between the amount of attention that migrants from a given country receive in the media and the official population estimates. In the second, and most extensive stage, the representations of the foregrounded nationalities are analysed through the moral panic framework. Results show an extensive negative representation of some groups, but there is no evidence of a fully iterated moral panic relating to any of the nationalities investigated.

Language and law issue 1 is out

Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito is a free, exclusively online peer-reviewed journal published twice a year. It is available on the website of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto.
All articles should be submitted by email to the journal email address (llldjournal@gmail.com). See the guidelines for submission at the end of this issue.
Requests for book reviews should be sent to llldjournal@gmail.com.
Abstracts of PhD theses should be sent to the PhD Abstracts Editor, Dayane de Almeida (daycelestino@gmail.com).

Language and law website.