33.1151, Review: Applied Linguistics: Giltrow, Olsen, Mancini (2021)
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Subject: 33.1151, Review: Applied Linguistics: Giltrow, Olsen, Mancini (2021)
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Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2022 20:54:36
From: Farah Ali [farah636 at gmail.com]
Subject: Legal Meanings
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-3023.html
EDITOR: Janet Giltrow
EDITOR: Frances Olsen
EDITOR: Donato Mancini
TITLE: Legal Meanings
SUBTITLE: The Making and Use of Meaning in Legal Reasoning
SERIES TITLE: Foundations in Language and Law
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2021
REVIEWER: Farah Ali
SUMMARY
Given the codified nature of law, applying linguistic approaches to the study
of legal language can be an efficacious strategy for legal interpretation.
“Legal Meanings: The Making and Use of Meaning in Legal Reasoning” (editors:
Janet Giltrow, Frances Olsen, and Donato Mancini) focuses specifically on “how
law makes meaning and how meaning makes law” (back cover), and attempts to
show the ways in which examining language in a legal context can be impactful
in how meaning is encoded. The study of meaning is especially critical in a
legal context, since the production and interpretation of legal texts play a
pivotal role in informing how law is subsequently enforced. This inaugural
volume in the “Foundations in Law and Language” series, which is also a
product of the 2019 UCLA Conference of the International Law and Language
Association, is aimed at scholars and legal practitioners alike who are
interested in bridging law and linguistics, and provides both theoretical and
empirical works that apply an array of linguistic approaches to interrogate
legal interpretation.
The first chapter, “Legal meanings: Introduction” (Janet Giltrow), offers a
detailed overview of and reflection on each contribution in this edited
volume, along with some of their key takeaways. The next chapter, “Freedom of
art in French legal proceedings: A discourse analysis perspective” (Anna
Arzoumanov), focuses on the conflict between freedom of art and other
fundamental freedoms (e.g. protection of privacy and personal integrity).
Arzoumanov contextualizes this study in French legal proceedings that deal
with prosecution against various rappers for their controversial lyrics, and
specifically how the French notion of “distanciation”—an ambiguous term that
is often conceived as inherent to artistic expression— applies in each of the
cases examined. Through this case study, Arzoumanov points out the lack of
precision in defining concepts such as “distanciation”, among other concepts
specific to different genres of art (e.g. satire, caricature, etc.), which in
turn limits the interpretation of what is legally considered art, and thus,
how to even enforce freedom of art.
In “‘What else can you do to pass…?’: A pragmatics-based approach to quid pro
quo sexual harassment” (Victoria Guillén Nieto), the author examines a case of
verbal sexual harrassment in a Spanish university. Noting the difficulty that
many victims face in proving sexual harrassment, the author draws on a
pragmatics-based approach to demonstrate how discourse from a recorded
conversation can serve as evidence of quid pro quo sexual harassment.
Specifically, working from a framework of both (im)politeness theory and
speech act theory (Austin 1962; Grice 1975; Searle 1969; 1979; 1983), Guillén
Nieto demonstrates how different speech events during this conversation could
be used to interpret the suspect’s intended meaning—that he (a professor)
would grant the victim (a student) a passing grade in return for sexual
favors. Guillén Nieto reinforces these observations with an attitudinal survey
in which students interpret descriptions of the perpetrator’s actions as
constituting harassment.
Shifting to a United States context, “Hostility to religion or protection
against discrimination? Evaluation and argument in a case of conflicting
principles” (Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski) examines the language of judicial
argumentation found in the majority opinion of “Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd., et
al. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commision et al.”, a 2018 case in which the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who had refused to provide
service to a gay couple. Goźdź-Roszkowski uses pragma-dialectical theory of
argumentation (van Eemeren 2018) to show how judges rely on evaluative
language in their legal decisions, not only in the assessment of legal
situations and as a means of bolstering their own argumentation, but also
simultaneously using such language to limit the applicability of their own
ruling and setting an indisputable precedent for future cases.
“Heller (2008) and the language of the Second Amendment: Grammar, meaning, and
canonical conventions” (James Vanden Bosch) also centers around a U.S. Supreme
Court decision (“District of Columbia, et al., Petitioners v. Dick Anthony
Heller”, 2008), but focuses on the language of the Second Amendment in the
U.S. Constitution, which addresses the right to bear firearms: “A well
regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right
of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” According to the
2008 ruling, this Amendment grants such rights to individuals, and not only to
those belonging to a “well regulated Militia.” Using data from the Corpus of
Early Modern English and from the Corpus of Founding Era American English,
Vanden Bosch examines absolute phrases that resemble those found in the Second
Amendment (i.e. “being necessary”) in order to interpret the legal meaning of
the Second Amendment at the time of its ratification. He concludes that the
evidence supports “the older, traditional interpretation of this amendment,
namely, that the bearing of arms referred to in the operative clause is done
in support of well-regulated militias, not for hunting and self-defense.” (p.
94).
“Experimental legal linguistics: A research agenda” (Jacob Livingston Slosser)
takes on a cognitive approach to legal meanings. Here, Slosser proposes a
cognitive linguistic experimental paradigm for examining the underlying
mechanisms that encode meaning within our thoughts, which can also be extended
to understanding meaning in the context of legal thought. Specifically, this
experimental approach is grounded in conceptual metaphor theory, whereby
metaphors serve as cognitive mechanisms that structure “thought in
co-relational mappings that people use to derive abstractions from concrete
experience and from motor-sensory input” (p. 109). Using this theory as a
foundation, Slosser proposes a methodology which is meant to “highlight and
test assumptions about the force of underlying mechanisms that affect meaning,
not only within legal thought but within thought itself” (p. 108).
In a similar vein, “Pragmatics and the interpretation of international law:
two relevance theory-based approaches” (Jennifer Smolka and Benedikt Pirker)
offers a theoretical, cognitive-pragmatic approach to examining international
law and the interpretation of international treaties. Using Ariel’s (2016)
work on pragmatic interpretations, Smolka and Pirker apply relevance theory to
examine typologies of inferred meaning and, additionally, look at both neo-
and post-Gricean perspectives on the concept of explicature and how it is
applied to the legal interpretation of treaties. Drawing on various legal
cases as examples, Smolka and Pirker argue that pragmatic typologies of
inferred meaning can offer “more precise linguistic categorisations than the
explanations for interpretations typically provided by interpreting agents in
international law” (p. 159). They further conclude that post-Gricean
approaches to explicature are more conducive to forming legal inferences than
are neo-Gricean ones.
The final chapter, “Temporal meanings in legal translation English-Russian
lacunas and associated semantic uncertainties” (Svetlana V. Vlasenko), looks
at temporal meanings in the context of legal translation, specifically,
between English and Russian. Given that temporal meaning is embedded in
linguistic and cultural context, Vlasenko highlights the ways meaning can be
lost in translation, and how these potential mismatches are particularly
crucial to recognize and address in a legal context, where time serves as an
important parameter in legal documents (e.g. the moments that a document comes
into effect and/or expires). Vlasenko looks at various phrases that cannot be
translated directly from English to Russian (e.g. “at all times”) and also
examines at length two specific Russian examples : the terms “dekada” (a 10
day period) and “sutki” (a 24 hour period), as well as the translation
challenges that these terms present in legal contexts.
EVALUATION
Together, these chapters form a cohesive yet diversified volume that deals
with different issues relevant to the theme of how meaning is constructed and
interpreted in a legal context. This edited volume has several merits that
recommend it as a valuable contribution to the field of language and law.
First, the editors are to be commended for curating this collection of work,
the entirety of which addresses the broader connection between meaning and law
and thus the individual chapters cohere as a volume. Additionally, each
chapter offers a different perspective through which the reader can engage on
this topic. The authors not only provide a variety of theoretical,
methodological, and empirical approaches, but also set their works in
different sociocultural contexts, which is especially important when we
consider how law can vary greatly from one jurisdiction to the next.
Additionally, the authors have individually contributed to the overall
strength and reliability of this edited volume, in that each chapter is
well-grounded in the authors’ chosen theoretical frameworks, and they clearly
highlight the relevance of their work to legal practice.
While this edited volume provides a solid compilation of scholarly work on
meaning in legal reasoning, one consistent shortcoming that could serve as an
area of improvement—perhaps for subsequent volumes in this series—would be the
introductory sections of each chapter. The introductory chapter itself, while
providing a very helpful and clear overview of each chapter, could have
included a more general introduction to the broader topic at hand in order to
better situate the reader. Similarly, some of the chapters that follow do not
include clearly delineated objectives in their introductions; without knowing
what questions the authors are addressing, nor how they plan to address them,
readers may have difficulty following the authors’ line of reasoning.
As noted earlier, this edited volume aims to show “how law makes meaning and
how meaning makes law,” and through the thoughtful efforts of the editors and
authors, this goal is achieved, both in the individual chapters and as an
entire collection. However, it is also worth noting that, considering that
this volume is part of a series titled “Foundations in Language and Law”, the
work presented in this book appears to be for an audience that already has
foundational training in this field, rather than for individuals who do not
already have some background in semantics and/or pragmatics. Still, this book
exposes readers to various ways of thinking about meaning in a legal context,
and offers work that can certainly serve as a springboard for further research
and discussion on what is manifestly a critical element in the study and
practice of law.
REFERENCES
Ariel, Mira. 2016. Revisiting the typology of pragmatic interpretations.
Intercultural Pragmatics
13 (1). 1-36.
Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. London: Clarendon.
Eemeren, Frans H. van. 2018. Strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse:
Extending the
pragma-dialectic theory of argumentation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Grice, Herbert Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole and Jerry
Morgan (eds.), Syntax
and Semantics 3: Speech acts, 41-58. New York: Academic Press.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language.
Cambridge, UK
Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. 1979. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech
acts. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of the mind.
Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Farah Ali is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at DePauw University. A
sociolinguist by training, her research interests include language policy and
planning, media discourse, language attitudes, and multilingualism.
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