International Journal of Legal English
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
International Journal of Legal English Volume 2 Issue 2 2014 International Journal of Legal English Volume 2 Issue 2 2014 The International Journal of Legal English Volume 2 Issue 2 September 2014 Chief Editor: Prof. Li LI China University of Political Science and Law Beijing China Chief Australian Advisor Dr. Beata Webb Bond University Australia Published by the English Language Education Publishing 1 International Journal of Legal English Volume 2 Issue 2 2014 © English Language Education Publishing Brisbane Australia This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of the English Language Education Publishing No unauthorized photocopying All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the. English Language Education Publishing [email protected] Chief Editor: Prof Li Li ISSN (to be assigned) 2 International Journal of Legal English Volume 2 Issue 2 2014 Table of Contents I. The Use of ‘or’ in Post-graduate Student Academic Legal Writing. Paschal Maher ……………………………………………………………………………………… 4 II. Social Semiotic Approach to Civil Judgments in the Mainland of China: Generic Structure Potential Model. Min Dong Nancy, Songdan Buo……………………... 19 III. Legislation Translation in China: A Perspective of Horizontal Equivalence. Luping Zhang……………………………………………………………………………………….. 52 IV. The Progress of Legal Semiotics in China. Hongqin Zhang………………………………….. 70 V. Chinese Translation of Long Sentences in Legal English: From a Contrastive Study Perspective. Xiaojuan Liu ………………………………………………………….. 88 VI. Narrative Study on Witnesses’ Involvement in Their Statements. Li Sun………………… 99 3 The Use of ‘or’ in Post-graduate Student Academic Legal Writing PASCHAL MAHER Language Center of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland [email protected] BIO DATA Paschal Maher (PhD in Applied Linguistics) is an EAP instructor at the Language Centre of the University of Zurich and ETH, Zurich, Switzerland. He teaches English for law, English for medicine and runs pre-semester intensive courses for English for academic purposes. He is a member of the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland and has a particular interest in corpus based analyses of ESP contexts. He can be reached at [email protected]. ABSTRACT The use of „or‟ has a prevalence is legal academic writing that does not appear to be the case in other academic disciplines. While previous studies have looked at the phenomenon of „or‟ in expert writing contexts, there still remains a degree of uncertainty about what role it plays in student legal academic writing. This is partially because a standardised use of the construction, in terms of fixed binomials, is largely eschewed by law students and instead opt to fit relations around the „or‟ node according to the context in which a proposition is set. This paper shows how „or‟ can play a key role in giving clarity to legal scenarios as well as increasing the scope of a proposition to avoid misinterpretation, or exploitation, by another party. Based on this and other corpora analyses, it is to be assumed that the practice of using „or‟ comes from its use in the construction of formal legal documents, on which students frequently rely to support propositions and explain legal frameworks. Successful use of the node implies that the students already have a solid legal understanding of an issue and the lexical resources to express the relations which „or‟ enables. KEYWORDS Corpus analysis, student writing, binomial relations, rhetorical functions, clarity 1. In troduction According to Mellinkoff (1963: 148) „or‟ appeared as a conjunction in written English in the 13th century (as the short for „other‟, which originally meant „one of two‟ and not „either‟). In the 14th century „either‟ (which originally meant „each of two‟) also came to mean „or‟. Therefore, „or‟ could connect alternatives, equivalents or even emphasise alternatives when prefaced in the construction „either … or …‟ However, a general description may not suffice in providing a sufficient base upon which a pedagogy can be 4 built to enable students to acquire a better understanding of its use. A problem with the study of „or‟ is that the binomial relations it enables are often not of a fixed nature. Indeed, Biber et al. (1999: 1031) noted that recurrent binomial phrases with „or‟ were not common in their corpus and Gustafsson‟s 1975 analysis of a wide range of genres showed that 84% of all binomials occurred just once. Therefore, acquiring a clear picture of the use of „or‟ binomials requires the processing of a high number of variable cases in order to determine categories of functions. Having a more comprehensive understanding of the use of „or‟ is particularly relevant for the field of academic legal writing where, as the Material and Methods section will show, „or‟ ranks high among the high frequency keywords in the corpus of post-graduate academic legal writing. This phenomenon follows in the steps of Gustafsson‟s 1984 study of legislative texts, which recorded a rate of occurrence for binomials in general that was four to five times more frequent than in her corpus of newspapers, magazines, novels and popular scientific literature. Gustafsson‟s legislative texts also showed a higher rate of reoccurrence of binomial forms, with repetition at a rate of on average 2.3 times. As a first step to gain a better understanding of the context in which „or‟ typically works, the relations it can enable should be outlined. The three most common are synonymous, antonymous and hyponymous relations. 1.1 Synonymous Relations Harris (1973) defined synonymy as “the sameness of meaning of different expressions” (p.11), though both he and Murphy (2010) recognised the extreme difficulty in finding absolute synonyms, two words whose meanings are interchangeable in all contexts. Indeed, Carter and McCarthy (1988: 29) concluded that context is critical in assessing the extent of a synonymous relation. In light of the norm of imperfect alignment and being subject to the vagaries of context, the view provided by Murphy (2003) seems eminently pragmatic: she argued that that two items could be considered as synonyms so long as “their differences are slight enough that, in context, the two words‟ meanings contribute to the same context-relevant information (p.150). Therefore, ironically, synonymy‟s expression in real language appears to require an awareness of not just how and when items can be similar, but also discerning the degree of contrastive nature of them in order to ensure effective use. 1.2 Antonymous Relations Antonymy can be divided into two core divisions: gradable and non-gradable opposites. Lyons (1977: 279) considered gradable opposites to have the property of polarity (such as „big:small‟), with Carter and McCarthy (2006) recognising that gradable opposites were “the upper and lower parts of an open-ended scale” (p.442), in that there is no maximum or minimum on the scale and modification is possible (e.g. big, very big, incredibly big). Polarity, on the other hand, does not exist for ungradable opposites, the relation of male:female cannot be modified by „quite male‟, „very male‟ etc. Jeffries (2010: 19) referred to this as mutual exclusivity, Saeed (2009: 324) binary antonyms and Cruse (1986: 198) described this class of relations as complementaries. Jones (2002) did not draw any distinction arguing that, while the whole field encompasses a multitude of relationships, there is a basic commonality in that one recognises that indeed there is a sense that one expression stands in opposition to the other. However, the contrasts that 5 people choose, boy:girl, boy:man, happy:sad, happy:angry, imply that people activate what Willners and Paradis (2010: 16) referred to as a conceptual domain, in that the domain establishes a common identity for the terms. This notion of relatedness can also be seen in Lyons (1977) when he argued that most, if not all opposites “are drawn along some dimension of similarity” (p.286). Similarly, McCarthy (1988) argued that “terms in opposition will be locally determined” (p.197), which would seem to imply a shared understanding of the context if the utterance is to be successfully communicated. Therefore, just as synonymy implies an awareness of the degrees of contrast between items in a given context, for antonymy to work successfully it means all parties must fully comprehend the cline of identity on which the opposing meanings face each other. 1.3 Hyponymous Relations Lyons (1963) defined hyponymy in terms of “unilateral implication” (p.69) and used the example that „X is scarlet‟ will be understood to imply that that „X is red‟, but not conversely. Therefore, as Partington (1998: 32) observed, the truth value of a phrase is not altered if the hyponymous term is replaced by its superordinate, though the opposite vector does not hold (X may be red but it doesn‟t mean it‟s scarlet, it may be crimson). As we have already seen for antonymy and synonymy, hyponymy can also interact with the spheres of similarity and difference. For example, Jeffries (2010: 111) argued that apparent antonyms „stride:stroll‟ were in fact not so as they are both hyponyms of „walk‟ and hence closer to synonymy than antonymy. This fine line of distinction led Storjohann (2010: 83) to emphasise the closeness between a hyponymous relation. Murphy (2003: 139) on the other hand returns to the key role of context and its local language by noting that awareness of semantic closeness and semantic specificity were the issues that required the attention of the speakers in the situation of use. Context is also key in the ability to recognise the connection between seemingly disparate hyponymous members as noted by Carter and McCarthy (1988), who used the term pseudo-hyponymy to describe the disparate members of the hyponymous set for „presents‟.