A Linguistic Analysis of Legal English: Features, Complexity, Ambiguity, and the Movement toward Plain Legal Writing

Abstract

Legal English is a very specialized zone of professional discourse which uses technical terms, archaic usage, complex sentence types, nominalization, passive forms, binomial phrases, and context-dependent meanings. Linguistic features have been historically evolved to ensure precision, authority, consistency, comprehensiveness in legislation; however, they often present problems for comprehension to non-specialist readers and second language users. The aim of this research project has been to present an overview of the most important linguistic features of legal English, explore how these features relate to precision, complexity, and ambiguity and consider the implications for the use of plain-English principles in legal communication. The research design used was qualitative documentary and linguistic discourse-analytic design. The lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse analysis were used in the analysis of purposively selected statutes, judicial decisions, contracts, legal notices, and scholarly studies on the issues. The six main themes emerging from the thematic analysis were specialized legal vocabulary, historical and formulaic language, syntactic density and complexity, agency, authority and responsibility, semantic precision and ambiguity, and plain language and accessibility. The results showed that technical terminology, modality, passive voice, nominalization and syntactic elaboration can indeed have a legal function. But superfluous nominalization, too many repetitions, vague passive agents, and awkward sentence constructions hamper the readability and, at the worst, detract from legal precision. Such difficulties are especially great in Pakistan where English is a second language, yet plays an important role in law and legal practice as well as legal education. The study concludes that plain legal writing must maintain the legal language needed to adequately communicate the meaning of the law, but not use unnecessary language for the purposes of legal communication. It suggests genre-sensitive drafting, multilingual communication, the consistent use of modals, better legal-English training, reader-testing and additional corpus-based research to make legal texts clearer, easier to read and more accessible.