Search results for " Legislative drafting"
showing 7 items of 7 documents
A linguistic Insight into Legislative Drafting. Tradition and Change in the UK Legislation
2023
The main assumption proposed in this book is that legislative drafting represents an example of professional discourse, where the propositions of specialized information is translated into meanings, and such meanings are given as input to the rules and strategies of grammatical formulation. A relevant question for our understanding of modern legislative process is related to the effects of ‘context’ at different levels, within which legislative process takes place. By looking at those levels, the analysis conducted in the book demonstrates that it becomes possible to reach a deeper understanding of the professional groups taking part in the process, better assess the lexico-grammatical and …
A Linguistic Insight into the Legislative Drafting of English-Speaking Jurisdictions
2020
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 …
Justiniano en Latinoamérica
2011
RESUMEN. El texto repasa las iniciativas y desarrollo de políticas que desde el poder legislativo en Argentina y Nicaragua han fraguado en la reciente elaboración de colecciones normativas de sus respectivos sistemas jurídicos. Tales recopilaciones son el Digesto Jurídico Argentino y Digesto Jurídico Nicaragüense y han respondido asimismo a principios de depuración, inventario, armonización, consolidación normativa y unificación de la legislación vigente. El autor se interesa por los logros de su programa de desarrollo técnico legislativa, así como por el alcance de tales planteamientos en términos jurídico-político de contribución a la seguridad jurídica y el fortalecimiento del Estado de…
Legislative provisions in context: a linguistic approach
2016
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.
Legislative Drafting and Language: Legal Language in Context
2016
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…
Gender Neutrality in Legislative Drafting Techniques. Where conventionality in English Language Meets Creativity in a Diachronic Perspective
2019
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…
Gender-neutral Language in EU Secondary Legislation: The Case of the English Language
2023
English does not have a grammatical gender, thus having an “intrinsic predisposition towards gender-neutral forms” (Poddighe 2020, 3). Most personal nouns do not indicate a specific gender, as in the case of person or engineer. However, there are also personal nouns with lexical gender, such as king or queen (Hellinger 2001). As a result, in English there is a risk of creating sentences that are not gender-neutral. Within the EU, the promotion of the use of a more inclusive language represents an important objective. For this reason, in recent years, various documents containing guidelines on gender-neutral language have been elaborated to encourage members of the EU institutions to adopt a…