Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
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Le Cheng
Le Cheng (b. 1976) is a professor at Zhejiang University and China University of Political Science and Law 〈chengle163@hotmail.com〉. His research interests include semiotics, terminology, language and law, and discourse analysis. His publications include “Attribution and judicial control in Chinese court judgments: A corpus-based study” (2011); “Legal Interpretation: Meaning as social construction” (with W. Cheng, 2012); “Jury instructions in Hong Kong: A Gricean perspective” (with W. Cheng, 2013); and “Reformulating and translating Chinese deontic modality” (2013).
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Winnie Cheng
Winnie Cheng (b. 1958) is a professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University 〈egwcheng@polyu.edu.hk〉. Her research interests include ESP, intercultural business and professional communication, intercultural pragmatics, and corpus linguistics. Her publications include “Teaching professional English and communication: Forming alliances with the industries” (2011); “Legislative bilingualization in Hong Kong: A case study of domestic and cohabitation relationships violence ordinance” (2011); “Speech acts, facework, and politeness: Relationship-building across cultures” (2012); andExploring corpus linguistics: Language in action (2012).King-Kui Sin (b. 1947) is an adjunct professor and special consultant at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong 〈kingkuisin@gmail.com〉. His research interests include language and law and philosophy of language. His publications include “A matrix of legislative speech acts for Chinese and British statutes” (with S. F. Ni, 2011); and “Out of the fly-bottle: Conceptual confusions in multilingual legislation” (2013).
Abstract
Although legal terms are conventionally considered to have self-referential, self-closed meaning independent of context, a legal term only acquires its meaning within a given context. As long as the context varies, the meaning of the same legal term as a signifier may change correspondingly. Based on case studies by applying semiotics, we argue that a legal term is just a sign within its sign system; a legal term as an individual sign does not have any inherent meaning, and its meaning can only exist in the relationship with other signs or sign systems. In other words, a legal term only denotes in a particular temporal and spatial context. Through this study, we conclude four propositions about a legal term as a sign: first, the connection of a legal term with a legal concept is relatively arbitrary; second, the meaning of a legal term exists in a sign system; third, a legal term can be subject to multiple interpretations; fourth, the defining of a legal term may be affected by other sign systems.
About the authors
Le Cheng (b. 1976) is a professor at Zhejiang University and China University of Political Science and Law 〈chengle163@hotmail.com〉. His research interests include semiotics, terminology, language and law, and discourse analysis. His publications include “Attribution and judicial control in Chinese court judgments: A corpus-based study” (2011); “Legal Interpretation: Meaning as social construction” (with W. Cheng, 2012); “Jury instructions in Hong Kong: A Gricean perspective” (with W. Cheng, 2013); and “Reformulating and translating Chinese deontic modality” (2013).
Winnie Cheng (b. 1958) is a professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University 〈egwcheng@polyu.edu.hk〉. Her research interests include ESP, intercultural business and professional communication, intercultural pragmatics, and corpus linguistics. Her publications include “Teaching professional English and communication: Forming alliances with the industries” (2011); “Legislative bilingualization in Hong Kong: A case study of domestic and cohabitation relationships violence ordinance” (2011); “Speech acts, facework, and politeness: Relationship-building across cultures” (2012); and Exploring corpus linguistics: Language in action (2012).
King-Kui Sin (b. 1947) is an adjunct professor and special consultant at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong 〈kingkuisin@gmail.com〉. His research interests include language and law and philosophy of language. His publications include “A matrix of legislative speech acts for Chinese and British statutes” (with S. F. Ni, 2011); and “Out of the fly-bottle: Conceptual confusions in multilingual legislation” (2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
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- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
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- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
