Linguistics for legal interpretation / Terrence R Carney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Carney, Terrence R., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Law--Terminology.

Law.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (292 pages)

Place of Publication:

Johannesburg : UJ Press, 2023.

Summary:

Linguistics for Legal Interpretation is a language resource for scholars and practitioners of law who engage and work with statutory interpretation. It draws on lexical semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics to both understand and solve language challenges central to the interpretation effort. In addition, this book offers best practice guidelines for dictionary use as well as an introduction to corpus linguistic methods to assist legal interpreters in determining either ordinary or technical meaning. The book illustrates the various language tools and devices by applying them to case law and legislation, and it does so in an accessible style of writing. Terrence R Carney is Associate Professor of Afrikaans Linguistics at the University of South Africa. He specialises in the language of law.

Contents:

Intro

1. Introduction

1.1. A book about linguistics for legal interpretation

1.2. Focus and scope of book

1.3. Who this book is meant for

1.4. Who this book is not meant for

1.5. Citation

1.6. Writing and typographic conventions

1.7. Acknowledgements

2. Understanding Meaning

2.1. Basic terminology

2.1.1 Lexicon

2.1.2 Lexeme

2.1.3 Lexical item

2.1.4 Lexical word

2.1.5 Concept

2.1.6 Sense

2.1.7 Expression

2.1.8 Utterance

2.1.9 Sentence

2.1.10 Phrase

2.2. Word meaning

2.2.1 Lexical words

2.2.2 Grammatical words 2.3. Sentence meaning

2.4. Reference and denotative meaning

2.5. Connotative meaning

2.6. Social meaning

2.7. Conventional meaning and arbitrariness

2.8. Ordinary meaning

2.9. Ambiguity and vagueness

2.10. Conclusion

3. Understanding Word Relations

3.1. Semantic features

3.2. Synonymy

3.3. Antonymy

3.4. Homonymy

3.5. Polysemy

3.6. Categorisation

3.7. Hyponymy

3.8. Meronymy

3.9. Metonymy

3.10. Field relations and semantic frames

3.11. Collocations

3.12. Entailment

3.13. Presupposition

3.14. Conclusion 4. Understanding Non-Verbal Communication

4.1. Non-verbal communication

4.1.1 Body language

4.1.2 Gesturing

4.2. Prosody

4.3. Text stylistics and textual tone

4.4. Conclusion

5. Understanding Language Use

5.1. Language variety

5.2. Language contact

5.3. Language planning and language policy

5.4. Intercultural communication

5.5. Context

5.6. Spoken language

5.6.1 Utterances

5.6.2 Turn-taking and adjacency pairs

5.6.3 Deixis

5.6.4 Fillers, hedges and discourse markers

5.6.5 Transcriptions and annotations

5.7. Speech acts 5.7.1 Performatives

5.7.2 Felicity conditions

5.7.3 Locution, illocution, perlocution

5.7.4 Classification of speech acts

5.7.5 Indirect speech acts

5.7.6 Speech acts and the law

5.8. Implicature

5.8.1 Conversational implicature

5.8.2 Cooperative principle

5.9. Relevance theory

5.9.1 Principle of Relevance

5.10. Politeness

5.10.1 Face

5.10.2 Linguistic devices for politeness

5.10.3 Maxims of politeness

5.10.4 Indirect language

5.10.5 Impoliteness

5.10.6 Politeness and law

5.11. Conclusion

6. Understanding Dictionaries 6.1. Defining 'dictionary'

6.2. Dictionary limitations

6.3. Dictionary types and intended users

6.4. Definitions

6.5. Using a thesaurus

6.6. Best practice when using dictionaries for legal interpretation

6.7. A digital dictionary of statutory terms: an idea

6.8. Conclusion

7. Understanding Corpora

7.1. What is a corpus

7.2. Types of corpora

7.3. South African limitations

7.4. The tools of a corpus

7.4.1 Concordancer and KWIC searches

7.4.2 Word forms, types, tokens and nodes

7.4.3 Frequency, wordlists and keywords

7.4.4 Collocations and n-grams.

Notes:

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