Legal Communication : A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Praca stanowi pierwszą w polskiej literaturze próbę integralnego powiązania ze sobą zagadnień lingwistyki o zabarwieniu kulturowym z zagadnieniami prawoznawstwa. Można ją traktować jako jeden z podstawowych tekstów w zakresie kształcenia adeptów przekładu prawnego. Książka jest przeznaczona dla tłumaczy oraz innych specjalistów w dziedzinie prawnej, przede wszystkim prawodawców, sędziów i pracowników naukowych, specjalizujących się w teorii i filozofii prawa. Prawnikom i językoznawcom pomaga w bliższym zrozumieniu tekstów prawnych w nowych kontekstach komunikacji prawnej. Legal Communication: A Cross-Cultural Perspective proposes an integrated interdisciplinary framework for describing and explaining legal communication. The pragmalinguistic analysis of English and continental legal discourse combines two areas of expertise: linguistics and jurisprudence. Legal discourse is treated as an instance of cross-cultural communication and explained against tendencies of globalization and Europeanization. This book is intended for legal translators and interpreters as well as other specialists in the legal domain, first of all legislators, judges and academics specializing in theory and philosophy of law. It brings both lawyers and linguists closer to the understanding of legal texts in new contexts of legal communication.

Introduction 7 PART I. SETTING THE LEGAL SCENE 15 Chapter 1. Language of law and legal communication 17 1.1. The concept and the status of the language of law 18 1.2. Evolution of the language of law 28 1.3. The language of law as special purpose communication 35 1.4. Approaches to studies of language of law and legal communication 41 Chapter 2. Speaking voices in legal context 51 2.1. Participant roles and their linguistic expression from the point of view of (socio)linguistics and jurisprudence 52 2.1.1. Addresser and sender 55 2.1.2. Addressee and receiver 58 2.2. The position of translator in legal communication 65 2.3. The structure of the legal community 70 2.3.1. Analysing communities 71 2.3.2. Legal community as specialist discourse community 77 PART II. TOWARDS AN INTERTEXTUAL DESCRIPTION OF LEGAL DISCOURSE 85 Chapter 3. Semantics of legal discourse 87 3.1. Precision 93 3.2. Indeterminacy 103 3.3. Specialization 106 3.4. Complexity 109 3.5. Conservatism 121 Chapter 4. Pragmatics of legal discourse 131 4.1. Evolution of text typologies 133 4.2. Legal discourse as authoritarian discourse 137 4.3. Legal rhetoric and legal genres 140 4.4. Legal reasoning 150 4.5. Legal speech acts and performativity 157 4.6. Legal modality 166 4.7. Intertextuality of legal discourse 174 PART III. LEGAL DISCOURSE IN CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXT 179 Chapter 5. Law, context, culture 181 5.1. Analysing context 181 5.2. Legal culture(s) as context 188 Chapter 6. Legal power 195 6.1. Analysing power 196 6.2. Power of expert knowledge 201 6.3. Legal interpretation 204 Chapter 7. ‘Europeanisation’ of Polish legal discourse and legal culture 211 7.1. The European legal culture as a hybrid culture 211 7.2 Development of the European legal culture 212 7.3. The ‘Europeanisation’ of Polish legislative discourse 222 Conclusions 233 Bibliography 241 Index 267