Shifts in the language of law: reading the registers of official-language statutes
-
Keith Battarbee
Abstract
This article examines a striking shift in the style and register of recent official-languages legislation in three Anglophone jurisdictions: Canada, Ireland, and South Africa. The discourse of certain key Canadian and South African statutes is shown to be very different from the traditional language of the law, whereas the recent Irish legislation reveals no such stylistic shift, nor is the “new discourse” maintained in subsequent and related Canadian or South African statutes. It is argued that the motivation for the stylistic shift in the Canadian Charter and South African Constitution, away from traditional legal register toward greater transparency, while undoubtedly consistent with a broader movement toward “Plain English” in legal language, also specifically reflects the impact of the Human Rights Revolution (here described as the “Great Values Shift”).
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Corporate meetings as genre: a study of the role of the chair in corporate meeting talk
- Shifts in the language of law: reading the registers of official-language statutes
- Toward a functional framework for discourse particles: a comparison of well and so
- Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): the influence of studying through English on Spanish students' first-language written discourse
- Co-constructing a virtuous ingroup attitude? Evaluation of new business activities in a group interview of farmers
- Extraposition constructions in the deontic domain: state-of-affairs (SoA)-related versus speaker-related uses
- Examining two explicit formulations in university discourse
Articles in the same Issue
- Corporate meetings as genre: a study of the role of the chair in corporate meeting talk
- Shifts in the language of law: reading the registers of official-language statutes
- Toward a functional framework for discourse particles: a comparison of well and so
- Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): the influence of studying through English on Spanish students' first-language written discourse
- Co-constructing a virtuous ingroup attitude? Evaluation of new business activities in a group interview of farmers
- Extraposition constructions in the deontic domain: state-of-affairs (SoA)-related versus speaker-related uses
- Examining two explicit formulations in university discourse
