Epistemic Modality Variation in Community Law Journals

Over the last decades the attention of scholars working in the filed of academic discourse has been directed towards language variation, and academic writing is not any more considered as a consistent and homogeneous form of discourse. The importance traditionally given to the consensual and static aspects of disciplinary communication has been coupled with the emphasis increasingly placed to the analysis of interactions/practices/activities that sustain discourse communities. According to the sociolinguist approach, genres become ‘dynamically rhetorical structures’ that can be manoeuvred according to the discipline’s norms, values and ideology, both historically and incrementally changing …

Legislative Drafting e linguaggio: ipotesi di semplificazione del testo normativo

l’ipotesi su cui si basa il presente articolo è che la disciplina della linguistica applicata possa dare un valido contributo al miglioramento della scrittura legislativa. recenti studi linguistici dimostrano che i legislative drafters spesso non colgono l’essenza dei concetti politici che hanno il compito di comunicare, proponendo un metodo attraverso il quale questi ultimi possano raggiungere tale obiettivo e di verificarne l’adeguatezza e rispondenza alla volontà del legislatore. l’analisi proposta dagli autori del contributo identifica nella chiarezza, nella precisione e nella univocità gli strumenti necessari al raggiungimento di tale scopo; applica prove linguistiche ad una serie di t…

Mediation process: increasing language awareness and developing communication skills

European countries have known mediation for a long time. Notwithstanding that, various approaches and rules of mediation developed in different places all over Europe and Member States still do not have regulated mediation at all (Espluques et al. 2012). The European Union has tackled this problem with the aim to change mediation into a flexible and useful tool for the parties to solve their disputes in civil and commercial matters. The objective of this paper is to provide first a general overview of mediation process on the basis of the Directive 2008/52/EC of the European Parliament and the Council on certain aspects of mediation in civil and commercial matters. Then, attention will be f…

Legislative drafting and gender: some linguistic insights into English and Italian

Languages vary widely in terms of gender systems showing differences in the number of classes, underlying assignment rules and how and where gender is marked. The legislative drafting policy conventionally known as the ‘masculine rule’, whereby ‘he includes she’, raised opposition in the 1970s (under the pressure of feminist movements in the United States and Europe), and the adoption of plain English style forced legislative drafters to basically avoid sentences of undue length, superfluous definitions, repeated words and gender specificity with the aim of achieving clarity, minimising ambiguity, and enhance gender-neutrality. Given the prevalence of English as lingua franca, an increasing…

Communicating Medical Information Online: The Case of Adolescent Health Websites

In recent times, our understanding and practice of public health has been increasingly guided by technological advances generally based on governmental decisions (Green et al. 2009). Not only does the growth of a public system for protecting health hinge upon scientific discovery and dissemination of medical knowledge, but also the World Wide Web has considerably changed the health communication environment. This paper considers the online health information addressed to adolescents. Given that young people have difficulty accessing traditional health services, in theory, the Internet might offer them a more confidential and convenient access to an unprecedented level of information about a…

La Traduzione Legale nel Panorama Internazionale

A Linguistic Insight into the Legislative Drafting of English-Speaking Jurisdictions

Gender specificity in legislation started being questioned in the late 20th century, and the need to reform the way in which laws have been written for more than onehundred years has been particularly evident in English-language jurisdictions. In the 1990s and 2000s, the adoption of a plain English style forced legislative drafters to avoid sentences of undue length, superfluous definitions, repeated words and gender specificity with the aim of achieving clarity and minimizing ambiguity. Experts in the legal field have suggested reorganizing sentences, avoiding male pronouns, repeating the noun in place of the pronoun, replacing a nominalization with a verb form, resorting to ‘the singular …

Comunità e autonomia: Unione Europea e European Social Discourse

Dal un punto di vista della discourse analysis, strategie vincenti di regolamento e controllo creano nuovi sistemi di discorso e linguaggio, ovvero nuove configurazioni e strutture discorsive. Tuttavia, il dominio o supremazia delle suddette non potrà mai essere completo e definitivo, dal momento che strategie alternative e/o di segno opposto alle dominanti (alle quali corrisponderanno diversi gruppi di potere e rispettive configurazioni e strutture di discorso) tenteranno di imporre il proprio controllo e supremazia. Il fenomeno della globalizzazione, pertanto, non può ridursi ad un mero processo omogeneizzante, quasi una sorta di meccanica diffusione generale e globale di modelli e strutt…

Decodificazione del Testo Normativo: Conoscere per Tradurre

Translating Legal Texts. When language meets law.

The image of translation as a process of mere linguistic transposition with the sole purpose of preserving the meaning of the original message, began to be challenged at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century. With an increasing number of scholars raising doubts about the methodologies and theoretical approaches which have traditionally characterized this field of study, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the emancipation of translation activity together with the recognition of the rights of translator. Signs of this new approach have been recognized even in the specialized field of legal communication that, notwithstanding its own peculiarities, is among the specialized languages …

Crossing the Borders between Legislative Drafting and Linguistics: Linguists to the Aid of Legislative Drafters

‘Crossing the Borders between Legislative Drafting and Linguistics: Linguists to the Aid of Legislative Drafters’ is the focus of the co-authored article by Helen Xanthaki and Giulia Adriana Pennisi. In her discussion, Helen Xanthaki claims that linguists provide a useful contribution to ‘phronetic legislative drafting’, on account of common areas of interaction where lexico-grammatical and discourse analysis help to understand the meanings and functions of text production. This is then examined by Giulia Adriana Pennisi who draws on the institutional legal discourse enacted in the Treaty of Lisbon to argue for divergent – yet indeed uniform – constitutional principles and values.

IL DIALOGO NELLA MEDIAZIONE E RISOLUZIONE DI CONFLITTI. APPROFONDIMENTI LINGUISTICI

I paesi europei conoscono da tempo varie forme di mediazione e conciliazione. Pur nella diversità di metodologie e regole della mediazione presenti nei paesi membri, sono riscontrabili tratti comuni che tuttavia necessiterebbero di una regolamentazione univoca per tutto il territorio europeo. Il ruolo assunto dall’esperienza comunitaria in materia di conciliazione è assai rilevante, in quanto lo strumento della mediazione ha ricevuto un importante sviluppo grazie alle direttive europee aventi lo scopo di adeguare le legislazioni degli Stati membri in materia di Alternatitve Dispute Resolution (ADR), dapprima in materia societaria e commerciale, successivamente in materia di consumo e nei ra…

Tackling Online Disinformation. The Construction of 'Trustworthiness' and 'Best Practices' in the European Commission Discourse on COVID-19

Over the last few decades, misleading healthcare information and deceptions with false claims, conspiracy theories (CTs) and consumer fraud have endangered public health on a global scale. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a substantial flow of false information and unceasing attempts by conspirators to influence debates in the official discourses, breeding on the fertile ground of people’s most basic anxieties and the present-day social and economic uncertainty. This paper investigates the discourse of the European Commission on disinformation in order to achieve institutional legitimation through the linguistic and discursive construction of ‘trustworthiness’, ‘…

Interdiscursive Hybridity of European Social Dialogue

The European social dialogue, which is the name given to the bipartite/tripartite work of the representative social partner organizations, has evolved significantly since it was first introduced in 1985 and constitutes one of the pillars of the European Union (artt.137-139 of the Treaty establishing the European Community). The European dialogue, which is based on the principles of responsibility, solidarity and participation, is now structured within the governance of the Union and allows the social partners to make an important contribution to the definition of European social standards (COM(2002)341 final; COM(2004)557 final). However, the system of social partnership and independent soc…

‘Europeanization’ of Family Law: Interaction/Intersection of Cultural and Lexical diversities

The variety of national family laws constitutes a serious obstacle to the free movement of persons within the European Union. From this point of view, the establishment of minimum standards together with the creation of a ‘common core’ of family law rules become one of the main goals of the EU institutions in order to make the principle of Community freedom effective. Since the late 1990s the discourse on the relationship between family law(s) and Community law has changed significantly (1999 Action Plan; The Amsterdam Treaty, art.65; EU Treaty, art.39). Yet, notwithstanding the general sociological/socio-cultural changes that have affected the legal categories of family and marriage (i.e.,…

Deeds not words’: Emmeline Pankhurst and the vote for women

Women born in the nineteenth century had little chance of escaping the role that was considered their destiny - to marry young, stay home and raise a family. Campaigners like Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Garret Anderson carried out a personal and largely peaceful struggle to improve chances of an education and open professions like medicine to women. In the early part of the century ‘the suffragists’ were unsuccessful in their immediate objective, although they still exist in the form of one of the British main research and lobbying groups working on behalf of women, the Fawcett Society. In 1889, an English woman Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Franchise League, which fought to al…

Developing a new approach to managing and mediating conflicts

Generally speaking, words can be elusive and they need to be carefully selected when conveying messages, ideas and proposals between parties. This is all the more evident in mediation process as language has to be neutral and mediators should avoid expressions directing parties. In this regard, recent theoretical developments in postmodern social theory and the social constructionist movement in the social sciences and humanities have provided the field of alternative dispute resolution with a new approach to managing and mediating conflicts. These developments are organized around the ‘narrative approach’ which helps us to see how the language we use to describe and understand our conflict…

Legislative provisions in context: a linguistic approach

The paper takes into consideration legislative provisions from a linguistic point of view. It applies tests of language in a number of texts belonging to the common law drafting practice to ascertain a loss of conceptual focus by legislative drafters and concludes that linguistics can provide a method by which drafters can assess the effectiveness of their draft.

Linguistic Competences in the Mediation System: increasing Language Awareness and Developing Communication Skills

Over the last decades lawyers and experts in the field of law have increasingly moved beyond advisory and representative roles towards neutral, non-aligned interventions, and have developed new professional techniques in aid of new settlement strategies. Despite cultural diversity and variations over time, the different contexts within which informal principles of justice have often been found reveal a prevalent trend to create alternatives to adjudication for handling disputes, such as negotiation and mediation processes. The present analysis focuses on the linguistic skills and communication strategies that experts need to know and apply when conducting a mediation. The aim is to demonstr…

Epistemic Modality Markers in European and American Law Journals

Over the last decades the attention of scholars working in the filed of social sciences has been directed towards language variation, and discourse analysis has increasingly evolved as a valuable way of understanding the use of language in a variety of academic, institutional and professional settings (Clyne 1994; Flowerdew & Gotti 2006; Bhatia et al. 2008). According to the sociolinguist approach, genres become ‘dynamically rhetorical structures’ that can be manoeuvred according to the discipline’s norms, values and ideology, both historically and incrementally changing as disciplinary knowledge and genres required and created by discourse communities’ change (Bhatia 2004; Hyland 2004,…

What Gender-Neutral Legislation Owes to Grammar: The Concept of ‘Gender’ in Legal English and the Italian Guidelines for Use of Gender-Sensitive Language in Legislation

Gender-neutral language, also called non-sexist, genderinclusive, or non-gender-specific language, refers to language that includes words or expressions that cannot be taken to refer to one gender only. As a matter of fact, languages vary widely in terms of gender systems showing differences in the number of classes, underlying assignment rules and how and where gender is marked. In everyday speech, the word gender is usually associated with the biological and social differences between men and women (as in the case of Italian), and the view that grammatical gender mirrors natural gender is still evident in the terms masculine, feminine, and neuter that are used to label individual gender d…

All-inclusiveness in Legal Language. Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Specialized Discourse

This book explores recent theoretical and practical changes in the investigation of language and context, with a particular attention to legal language as a highly specialized discourse. Given the huge variety of human experiences, any approach to language cannot be solely conducted at the level of grammatical rules and structures, but at the level of social contexts and contextual backgrounds as well. In fact, important form-function correlations are discovered when lexico-grammatical investigations are supported by sociocultural and psycho-cognitive enquires about the way in which textual artefacts (and, particularly, specialized texts) are conventionally and linguistically organized and …

Resemiotising text meanings. The UK Law Commission and the summary of consultation paper on surrogacy

Modern legislative drafting theory urges legislative drafters in common law jurisdictions to bare the text from preliminary provisions and to start as early as possible with the regulatory message that the government is trying to convey to citizens. In line with the present legislation needs, the UK Law Commission Annual Report 2018-2019 states that “We have a statutory duty to promote the reform of the law and continue to work hard in this area”, alongside the production of graphics, infographics, images and pictures “to explain in plain English each new law reform project”. In this paper, O’Halloran et al.’s 2016 concept of intersemiotic translation, which takes place within and across th…

The lexicon of community acquis: how to negotiate the non-negotiable

In the context of the activities aimed to improve and develop the integration and cooperation of new Member States together with the states already belonging to the European Community, EU institutions have carried out a number of measures to increase the coherence of the body of common rights and obligations, binding all the Member States of the European Union (community acquis), for a long time. For this reason, the Commission of the European Community began in 2001 a process of consultation and discussion about the way in which problems resulting from the lack of a correspondence between national contract laws (and related terms) belonging to different legal systems should be dealt with a…

Legislative Drafting and Language: Legal Language in Context

A word, when used in a piece of text, usually denotes only one meaning out of the multiple meanings it is inherently capable of bearing. The general observation is that it is the context that determines which meaning of the word should be considered. This observation, as a logical consequence, leads us to identify the context responsible for meaning variation of a word. The general view is that the identification of context depends heavily on intuitive abilities of a language user. One way to facilitate the achievement of the important goal of ensuring that legislation is interpreted as the drafter intended is clearly to make legislative drafters more aware of the linguistic aspects of thei…

White Paper on Governance: EU Attempt to Popularize Legal Discourse?

Since the 1990s the discourse on the relationship between the EU institutions and member states in the field of European action has changed significantly and it has been increasingly supplemented by framework agreements between the actors involved in the Community dialogue. In this regard, the White Paper on Governance (Brussels, 25.7.2001 - COM(2001) 428final) contains a series of recommendations on how to enhance democracy in Europe and boost the legitimacy of the institutions. The aim is to modernize European public action in order to increase the accountability of European executive bodies to the elected assemblies and open up the Union's decision-making procedures to allow citizens to …

Gender Neutrality in Legislative Drafting Techniques. Where conventionality in English Language Meets Creativity in a Diachronic Perspective

Over the last decades, proposals to modernise legislative drafting have been choral and among the specific causes generally mentioned there are sentences of undue length, overuse of archaic expressions, repeated definitions and expressions, partiality of nominalisations, lack of gender neutrality. The aim of this analysis is to explore the legislative techniques adopted by drafters of English-speaking countries over the last decades, who are asked to write legal sentences aiming at gender fair and symmetric representation of men and women. The issue examined from a lexico-grammatical perspective culminates in the proposed questions whether certain techniques used to implement gender-neutral…

The challenges of Language: re-shaping legislative discourse(s) and text(s)

Since the 1990s the discourse on the relationship between the EU and member states in the field of labour law has changed significantly and it has been increasingly supplemented by framework agreements between the EU and the actors involved in the labour law dialogue. From this point of view, the Green Paper on Modernising labour law invites member states, the social partners and other interested parties to participate in a consultation process and an open debate, in order to look at how labour law can help promote flexibility in conjunction with security, regardless of the type of employment contract. The aim of this paper is to explore how the labour law interactants re-shape their discou…

The Discursive Construction of European Identity: Stylistic Analysis of "Text in Context"

The Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe submitted to the European Council meeting in Thessaloniki on June 2003 was intended to repeal by a single instrument all the existing European treaties (about 16 Treaties enacted between 1951-ECSC Treaty and 2001-Treaty of Nice, with the exception of the Euratom Treaty). Indeed, the ratification by all the Member States of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was necessary in order to enter it into force. Because of the difficulties and problems faced in ratifying the Treaty, the European Council decided in 2005 to start a ‘period of reflection’ on the future of the European Union. In particular, at the European Council me…

Modernising Labour Law: Re-Shaping Discourse(s) and Text(s)

The European Union establishes minimum requirements in the field of labour rights and work organisation (EC Treaty, articles 136-139). These requirements regard the consultation and information of workers, working hours, equal treatment and pay, insolvency and the transfer of undertakings. Since the 1990s the discourse on the relationship between the EU and member states in the field of labour law has changed significantly and it has been increasingly supplemented by framework agreements between the EU and the actors involved in the labour law dialogue. From this point of view, the Green Paper on Modernising labour law (Green Paper – Modernising labour law to meet the challenges of the 21st…