Search results for "Legislative Drafting"
showing 10 items of 12 documents
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…
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 …
English Language and European Union: A Corpus-Based Study of EU Secondary Legislation
2023
To this date, English is one of the working languages of the EU and, most importantly, it is the ‘de facto’ lingua franca of the EU, as the source language of most European documents is mainly English (Crystal 2017). Despite Brexit, English remains the most studied language in Europe (Kużelewska 2020), not to mention the fact that it is the language of globalization. However, the UK’s exit from the EU prompts the question as to what will be the development of English in the post-Brexit landscape. In light of this, the present article aims at conducting a linguistic analysis of Euro-English in order to assess if and how such type of English differs from the Standard English (SE). If yes, is…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
The challenges of Language: re-shaping legislative discourse(s) and text(s)
2015
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…
Crossing the Borders between Legislative Drafting and Linguistics: Linguists to the Aid of Legislative Drafters
2012
‘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.