5. Pragmatics and legal texts: How best to account for the gaps between literal meaning and communicative meaning

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Dedicated to the memory of Peter Tiersma v
3. Preface vii
4. Contents ix
5. List of contributors xi
6. 1. Introduction 1
7. I. Linguistic-pragmatic approaches to inference in law
8. 2. Telling it slant: Toward a taxonomy of deception 23
9. 3. Cooperation in Chinese courtroom discourse 57
10. 4. Inference and intention in legal interpretation 83
11. 5. Pragmatics and legal texts: How best to account for the gaps between literal meaning and communicative meaning 119
12. 6. One ambiguity, three legal approaches 145
13. II. Horizons of inference: Extending the context of interpretation
14. 7. Between similarity and analogy: Rethinking the role of prototypes in law and cognitive linguistics 167
15. 8. When is an insult a crime? On diverging conceptualizations and changing legislation 187
16. 9. Pragmatic interpretation by judges: Constrained performatives and the deployment of gender bias 205
17. 10. Disguising the dynamism of the law in Canadian courts: Judges using dictionaries 233
18. III. Across borders: New methods for study of inference
19. 11. Legal translation pragmatics: Legal meaning as text-external convention – the case of ‘chattels’ 249
20. 12. Calculating legal meanings? Drawbacks and opportunities of corpus-assisted legal linguistics to make the law (more) explicit 287
21. 13. The common error in theories of adjudication: An inferentialist argument for a doctrinal conception 307
22. 14. On inferencing in law 335
23. Subject index 369