NCJ Number
121728
Date Published
1989
Length
378 pages
Annotation
This book, intended for practicing lawyers, draftsmen, and judges, uses linguistic theory to analyze the language of contemporary Federal and Provincial statutes in Canada, with application to statutes of the United States and other jurisdictions relying on the British statutory tradition.
Abstract
The analysis looks at several dimensions of statutory expression and is divided into four parts and eight chapters. Part one examines the situational aspects of legislative expression with emphasis on the logical and grammatical form of speech acts, the enacting formula, and the situational and contextual meaning of statutes. Part two deals with the lexical aspects of legislative expression and focuses on lexical structure, semantics, clarity, and relations of similarity. Part three focuses on syntactic aspects of legislative expression such as time, tense, propositional structure, and sentence structure, while part four concerns itself with the stylistic aspects of legislative expression. Table of cases and indexes of words, phrases, and names.