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Formal Linguistics and Law

≥
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 212

Editors
Walter Bisang
(main editor for this volume)
Hans Henrich Hock
Werner Winter

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Formal Linguistics and Law

Edited by
Günther Grewendorf
Monika Rathert

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Formal linguistics and law / edited by Günther Grewendorf, Monika

Rathert.
p. cm. ⫺ (Trends in linguistics : studies and monographs ; v. 212)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-021838-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Law ⫺ Language. 2. Law ⫺ Interpretation and construction.
I. Grewendorf, Günther. II. Rathert, Monika, 1972⫺
K213.F668 2009
3401.14⫺dc22
2009028432

ISBN 978-3-11-021838-1
ISSN 1861-4302

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

” Copyright 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-
ical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, with-
out permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Laufen.
Printed in Germany.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements................................................................................... vii
List of contributors ................................................................................... ix

Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics.................... 1

Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

Part 1. Understanding the law: The contribution of

semantics and psycholinguistics

Law matters, syntax matters and semantics matters ................................. 25

Carl Vogel

Improving the comprehensibility of German court decisions................... 55

Stella Neumann

Understanding a Riester-pension: A reply to Becker and Klein (2008) ... 81

Monika Rathert

Part 2. Identifying the criminal: The contribution of

phonetics and text/corpus linguistics

Forensic phonetics and the influence of speaking style on global

measures of fundamental frequency .........................................................115
Michael Jessen

Phonetic cues to speaker age: A longitudinal study..................................141

Angelika Braun and Stefan Friebis

Does speech reveal one’s age? On the use of gerontolinguistic topics

for forensic authorship analysis ................................................................163
Jan Seifert
vi Table of contents

Part 3. Organizing legal systems: The contribution of

computational linguistics and artificial intelligence

Definition extraction from court decisions using computational

linguistic technology.................................................................................183
Stephan Walter

Making sense of legal texts.......................................................................225

Emile de Maat, Radboud Winkels and Tom van Engers

Interfacing between different legal systems using the examples of

N-Lex and EUR-Lex.................................................................................257
Doris Liebwald

The LOIS project and beyond...................................................................293

Erich Schweighofer

Part 4.- Multilingualism and the law: The contribution of

translation studies

Multilingualism in the European Union. Status quo and perspectives:

The reference language model ..................................................................315
Karin Luttermann

Drafting and interpretation of EU law – paradoxes of legal

multilingualism .........................................................................................339
Agnieszka Doczekalska

Multilingual law drafting in Switzerland..................................................371

Andreas Lötscher

A modular approach to legal drafting and translation ..............................401

Jacqueline Visconti

Index.........................................................................................................427
Acknowledgements

The chapters in this volume are updated versions of talks presented at the
workshop “Language and Law” that we organized at Bielefeld University,
Germany, in February 2006. The connections between language and (for-
mal) linguistics on the one hand, and law and jurisprudence, on the other,
were long observed in the literature, and our aim at the Bielefeld workshop
was to bring leading experts and practitioners together. We invited discus-
sions among the central approaches in psycholinguistics, semantics, pho-
netics, text/corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, artificial intelli-
gence and translation studies in so far as they were relevant to legal issues
such as understanding the law, identifying the criminal, organizing legal
systems and multilingualism and the law.
The result was a lively and engaging workshop, with papers addressing
the core issues that we wanted to tackle. Most contributions in this volume
are papers presented at this workshop, but we also asked other experts who
were not present in Bielefeld to contribute to the volume. Our aim in com-
piling the volume was to give a good overview about the current work in
formal linguistics and law in Europe.
Given the breadth of empirical coverage and expertise, we expect this
volume to be useful to linguists and jurists working in the area of language
and law, and, given the broad domain of discussion, it should be equally
valuable to psycholinguists, semanticists, phoneticians, text linguists, com-
putational linguists and translators. The volume can also be used for gradu-
ate and undergraduate level teaching.
It was an enormous pleasure for both of us to prepare this volume. We
would like to thank our authors for their contributions, we have benefited
enormously from reading their chapters. Many thanks also to our reviewers
who did a great job. We would like to thank Walter Bisang, Hans Henrich
Hock and Werner Winter for including this volume in the series “Trends in
Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]”.
Finally, we would like to thank Anke Beck, Birgit Sievert and Ursula
Kleinhenz at Mouton de Gruyter for their valuable editorial assistance and
guidance. Thanks also to Jan Köpping for proofreading and taking care of
the formatting of the manuscripts.
Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert
Frankfurt a.M./ Wuppertal, August 2009
List of contributors

Angelika Braun is Full Professor of Phonetics at the University of Trier

and interested in the forensic applications of phonetics and in socio-
phonetics with a focus on the communication of emotions and irony and on
dysfluencies as indicators of cognitive (mal)function. – She is chair of the
International Association for Forensic Phonetics.

Agnieszka Doczekalska holds a doctorate in law from the European Uni-

versity Institute, Florence, Italy and diplomas in translation from the Uni-
versity of Lodz, Poland and Université des Sciences Humaines de Stras-
bourg, France. Her research focuses on legal multilingualism and legal
translation, especially on legislative drafting in the European Union and
Canada.

Tom van Engers is the Director of the Leibniz Center for Law and holds a
chair in Legal Knowledge Management at the Law Faculty of the Univer-
sity of Amsterdam. He also is employed by the Dutch Tax and Customs
Administration, beginning in 1983, where he among other positions was
the program manager of the POWER program.

Stefan Friebis studied phonetics, computerlinguistics and German linguis-

tics at the University of Trier. After his M.A. he worked as an employee in
the field of public relations and as a Sales Manager in the digital signal
processing and speech recognition industry. Presently he is a lecturer in
adult education.

Günther Grewendorf is Professor of Linguistics at the University of

Frankfurt/Main. His research interests lie in generative syntax and universal
grammar, pragmatics, philosophy of language and forensic linguistics. He
is editor of the journal Linguistische Berichte (together with Arnim von
Stechow). His books include Noam Chomsky (Beck, 2006), Minimalisti-
sche Syntax (Francke, 2002), Ergativity in German (Foris, 1989), Aspekte
der deutschen Syntax (Narr, 1988) and Sprachliches Wissen (Suhrkamp,
1987, together with Fritz Hamm and Wolfgang Sternefeld); he has edited
Speech acts, mind, and social reality (Kluwer, 2002) together with Georg
Meggle, Rechtskultur als Sprachkultur (Suhrkamp, 1992), and Scrambling
and barriers (Benjamins, 1990) together with Wolfgang Sternefeld.
x List of contributors

Michael Jessen is a Research Associate at the Speaker Identification and

Audio Analysis Department of the National Forensic Science Institute
(Kriminaltechnisches Institut) of Bundeskriminalamt, Germany. He is in-
volved in casework and research in the domain of forensic speaker identifi-
cation. His research focuses on speaker characteristics and the multitude of
sources in which they can be observed in natural speech – including vocal
tract factors, global prosodic features, as well as linguistic-phonetic and
phonological aspects.

Doris Liebwald (PhD 2002, University of Vienna), Legal Expert for Com-
puters and Law. Presently employed at the Federal Chancellery of Austria,
Dep. I/13, E-Government. Furthermore Director of the Vienna Centre for
Computers and Law VCCL, Vice-spokesman of the Professional Group
“Juristische Informatiksysteme” within the (German) Gesellschaft für In-
formatik GI e.V., and Private Lecturer at the University of Applied Science
“Technikum Kärnten”. Her research focuses on legal information retrieval,
AI & law, legal expert systems, legal ontologies, and on Austrian, Euro-
pean and international ICT-law.

Andreas Lötscher was associate professor at the University of Basel for

German Linguistics and collaborator at the central linguistic services of the
Swiss Federal Chancery at Berne and has been retired since 2009. His main
fields of interest in linguistics include the linguistics of legal texts, text lin-
guistics in general, historical syntax and dialectology.

Karin Luttermann studied German, Romance languages and law in Ger-

many as well as abroad (Münster, Besancon, Berkeley, CA). She habili-
tated at the University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, where currently she gives lec-
tures in German Linguistics and European Studies. Her research focuses on
linguistic discourse analysis, text linguistics, intelligibility, languages for
special purposes, legal language and legislation on language in the Euro-
pean Union.

Emile de Maat is PhD student at the Leibniz Center for Law. His research
focuses on the structure and semantics of legal texts, as well as the use of
natural language processing to detect such structures and semantics.

Stella Neumann is Associate Professor of Modern English Linguistics at

Saarland University, Saarbrücken. Her main research interests are linguistic
variation, language for specialised purposes and empirical translation stud-
 List of contributors xi

ies in English and German. Her recent research projects include work on
optimising the comprehensibility of legal language, contrastive register
variation, corpus-based analyses of linguistic properties of translations and
experimental studies of the translation process.

Monika Rathert (PhD 2003, University of Tübingen) is Professor of Lin-

guistics at Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Her research interests lie in
morphosyntax, semantics, and language and the law. Her books include
Textures of Time (Akademie, 2004), and Sprache und Recht (Winter,
2006); she has edited Perfect Explorations (Mouton, 2003) together with
Artemis Alexiadou and Arnim von Stechow, and Quantification, Definite-
ness, and Nominalization (Oxford, 2009) together with Anastasia Gian-
nakidou. Her Habilitation thesis is on deverbal nominalizations in German
and English.

Erich Schweighofer is Associate Professor of Legal Informatics, Interna-

tional and European Law at University of Vienna. His research interests lie
in international and European governance, European competition law,
common agricultural policy, internet law, legal information retrieval, legal
ontologies, text analysis and text categorization. His books include Legal
Knowledge Representation (Kluwer Law International 1999, Springer
1999) and the joint publication of the conference proceedings of IRIS In-
ternationales Rechtsinformatik Symposion, the main yearly related confer-
ence in Central Europe (2000 -). He is also speaker of the legal informatics
groups in the German and Austrian computing societies and the main or-
ganizer of related conferences (in particular IRIS and KnowRight).

Jan Seifert is Assistant Professor at Bonn University, Germany, Depart-

ment for German Linguistics. His current fields of research are forensic
authorship analysis, archaisms, and gerontolinguistics.

Jacqueline Visconti is associate Professor of Italian linguistics at the Uni-

versity of Genova. Her interests include historical linguistics, with focus on
grammaticalization and semantic change theory, and text-linguistics, with
focus on the analysis of legal texts in a comparative perspective.

Carl Vogel is Senior Lecturer in Computational Linguistics at Trinity Col-

lege, Dublin. His work in syntax and semantics investigates the ramifica-
tions of metaphor and genericity in language and quirky distributions of
syntactic constructions that make authorship attribution, computational
xii List of contributors

styolometry, and other forms of automatic text categorization feasible.

These ramifications include the legal consequences of creative, idiosyn-
cratic, dialectal, ungrammatical or otherwise anomalous use of language.

Stephan Walter worked as a researcher in Computational Linguistics at

Saarland University until 2008. His research focused on the semantics of
legal language and on legal information extraction. He is now doing re-
search and development as a Linguistic Solutions Architect at euroscript
Luxembourg S.à r.l..

Radboud Winkels is associate professor in Computer Science & Law at

the Leibniz Center for Law, president of the JURIX foundation of Legal
Knowledge and Information Systems and vice-president of the Interna-
tional Association of AI and Law.
Language and Law – new applications of formal
linguistics

Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

1. Introduction

Law always has a linguistic form; there would be no law without language.
There would be no way to establish legal validity without language, as jus-
tice needs communication. In this respect, the laws of society and the laws
of nature differ. The laws of nature are valid although their correct formula-
tions are not known entirely; they would also be valid if nobody had ever
tried to put them in formulas. The laws of society are different, they only
come about via human communication; they depend on communication and
do not exist as such. The laws of nature are truly universal and eternal
whereas the laws of society are state-bound and prone to be changed. Imag-
ine a society without any law or rules; sooner or later someone will feel
disturbed by what someone else does and he will communicate this. Rules
of living together will be negotiated and law comes into a previously law-
less society.
Law is mediated through language, partially through spoken language
(e.g. at court), partially through written language (e.g. written statutory
regulations, ordinances). Litigation is a process that is oriented towards the
text of the written law and that results in new texts, judgments. Language
and law are intimately linked, and so are linguistics and jurisprudence.
The aim of this book is to show how different formal linguistic disci-
plines can fruitfully contribute to legal issues. The book wants to show the
many interfaces between linguistics and jurisprudence.
Before having a look at the interfaces, let us present the daily work of a
forensic linguist. What can linguists do for jurists? A company from the
Ruhr area is blackmailed, the following letter arrives (Dern 2003: 55ff.):

G. Grewendorf and M. Rathert (eds.): Formal Linguistics and Law, 1–22

© Berlin, New York: Mouton deGruyter
2 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

Figure 1. Part of a blackmailing letter (Dern 2003: 74)

The local police only have this letter, with no fingerprints or secretions on
it. The only trace to the offender is the language of the letter.
The local police ask the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) for a linguistic
analysis. The BKA observes the following:
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 3

(1) a. a major insecurity with regard to orthography, particularly with

consonant doubling and with the separate/ compound spelling
of words
b. frequent omission of spaces after commas
c. k is wrongly substituted for c in foreign words
d. errors with the dative
e. errors with t and d; in most cases, the written form is identical
with the spoken one
With this analysis at hand, a profile of the offender is sketched. Most
probably, the offender is from Hesse, Thuringia or Saxony; he does not
write much in his job and he did not have a higher education. In part 2 of
this book, the reader will see how such a concrete profiling like this is de-
veloped from the analysis in (1). The next step is to consult the database at
BKA for blackmailing letters with similar features like those in (1). Luck-
ily, there is a similar letter:

Figure 2: Part of a blackmailing letter (Dern 2003: 77)

4 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

Besides the features in (1), there are even more correspondences between
the two blackmailing letters in content, particularly with regards to transfer-
ring the money via credit cards. The BKA thus believes that the letters have
the same author. As the author of the letter in figure 2 is already known, the
blackmailing case in the Ruhr area is solved. Indeed, the offender was a
German man, born in 1956 in Saxony, he had worked as a mechanic and as
a salesman after the German reunification.
The linguists at the BKA perform important tasks, but they are not rep-
resentative of the majority of forensic linguists; the majority writes reports
for a case at court. Insults, libel, defamation, slander – these are the most
frequent issues where linguists are asked for reports; here is an example
(Kniffka 1981: 584):
(2) A housemate Y repeatedly writes letters to the caretaker; he com-
plains about housemate X. The letters include passages like the fol-
lowing:
1. Mr X and his concubine have used the laundry at times when
they had no permission.
2. Mr X and his concubine have repeatedly allowed their dog to
urinate on the lawn of the house.
The woman Z who is dubbed ‘concubine’ in the letters sues a declaration of
discontinuance against Y, she feels insulted by the term ‘concubine’. Now
linguistics comes into play. Y asks a linguist for a report, and this report
states that ‘concubine’ is no insulting term anymore, instead, it is neutral
now. With this at hand, Y starts an appeal against the declaration of discon-
tinuance. Now Z also asks a linguist for a report, and this report argues for
‘concubine’ still being a derogatory, insulting term. The court follows the
second report and Y loses the case.
This may suffice as an illustration of the daily work of a forensic lin-
guist. Useful introductions to the topic include Rathert (2006), Gibbons
(2005), Coulthard and Cotterill (2004), Olsson (2004). Very useful for get-
ting a research oriented overview are the following edited volumes: Gre-
wendorf (1992), Kniffka (1990), Haß-Zumkehr (2002); annotated bibliog-
raphies are Nussbaumer (1997), Levi (1994), Reitemeier (1985). For lay
persons with no background in law, Haft (1986), Wesel (2002) and Wesel
(2006) are helpful.
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 5

2. Overview of the volume

In this section, we present a brief overview of the main ideas expressed in

the parts of this volume.

Part 1: Understanding the law: the contribution of semantics and psycho-

linguistics

The interpretation of law is as old as law itself. Jurists and laypersons al-
ways ask for the precise meaning of a certain piece of the law, they are
engaged in a steady process of understanding the law. In linguistics, the
discipline investigating ‘meaning’ (of words or sentences or texts) is se-
mantics; thus, it is to be expected that semantics can contribute to a correct
understanding of the law. Part 1 also investigates the alleged incomprehen-
sibility of legal language. Many features are claimed to be responsible for
this: embeddings, complex noun phrases, nominalizations etc. It is the task
of psycholinguistics to investigate these features.
CARL VOGEL’s paper Law matters, syntax matters and semantics mat-
ters argues that the formal semanticist can usefully interact with legal ex-
perts during the process of formulating legal texts, and that the semanticist
can provide relevant advice for interpretive purposes. Vogel addresses a
huge set of examples from Irish constitutional and statutory issues. Judges
often explicitly appeal to linguistic principles of interpretation in justifying
legal opinions and decisions, yet they do so inconsistently. The linguistic
topics Vogel highlights as relevant for the interpretation of legal texts in-
clude the meaning relation between conjunction (and) and disjunction (or),
readings of the plural (collective versus distributive readings), the interpre-
tation of relative clauses, underspecification and vagueness, aspectual am-
biguity, and lexical semantics. To pick out an example, in some jurisdic-
tions (e.g. in New York), an interpretation statute specifies that and and or
are equivalent, referring to De Morgan’s laws in linguistics. As the follow-
ing holds ¬(I › \) l ¬I š ¬\, exemplified with You must not smoke or
eat in the library l You must not smoke and you must not eat in the
library, the misunderstanding is motivated. Obviously, the lawyers
responsible for the interpretation statute did not see the role of negation in
De Morgan, they only saw that conjunction and disjunction enter an
equivalence relation. Vogel also elucidates the merits and limitations of
recent attempts in Ireland’s legislation to provide semantic interpretation
6 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

principles, among them the guidelines of the Law Reform Committee

(2000) and the rules supplied by the Interpretation Act (2005).
In her paper Improving the comprehensibility of German court deci-
sions, STELLA NEUMANN investigates how legal texts can be optimized in
comprehensibility for laymen. Neumann starts out with example sentences
from a corpus of German court decisions and then rewrites them in two
variants, one with a mild syntactic simplification (version B) and another
with a radical simplification (version C). The simplifications concern sen-
tence complexity, NP complexity, and nominalizations in –ung. A set of 45
test persons is then exposed to the three variants. Tests measure three pa-
rameters of comprehension: the reading time, the time needed to answer
questions on the text, and the correctness of these answers. Version A (the
original text) proves least favourable in all respects. It results in the longest
reading times, the longest response latencies and the lowest degree of cor-
rect answers. Interestingly, version B participants take as long as their ver-
sion A counterparts to read the sentences. However, they need significantly
less time to think about their response and then are most likely to give the
correct response. Finally, when only looking at reading times and response
latencies, version C seems to offer the most efficient sentences for lay per-
sons. However, as for correctness of the responses, C is not any better than
A. This means that version C participants obviously run through the simple
sentences without thoroughly processing what they are reading. The per-
formance for correctness of responses in version B offers the decisive fac-
tor suggesting that version B works best with lay persons.
MONIKA RATHERT’s paper Understanding a Riester-pension: A reply to
Becker & Klein (2008) is a critical response to a study carried out by an
interdisciplinary research group at the Academy of Science at Berlin-
Brandenburg. The aim of the study was to investigate the comprehension of
insurance conditions by different individuals. The test persons were asked
to “think aloud” about their understanding of the insurance conditions; the
correctness of their understanding was checked with questionnaires. These
showed very good results (80-90% of correct answers), whereas the “think
aloud” protocols displayed severe misunderstandings. The authors of the
study are sceptical about the questionnaires, but Rathert raises scepticism
about the “think aloud” protocols. The “think aloud” situation is unnatural
for most readers, commenting on comprehension usually influences com-
prehension as reported by many psycholinguistic studies. Often, test per-
sons are nearly unable to report on their problem solving strategies, i.e. they
do not have introspective access to their own comprehension which is nev-
ertheless attested. In addition, the studies show that “thinking aloud”
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 7

pushes test persons to a rigid and less creative way of solving tasks. Thus,
as Rathert argues, it comes as no surprise that the test persons in (Becker
and Klein 2008) did not show many revisions of their false beliefs. A basic
criticism raised by Rathert concerns the point that there is no principled
way to predict comprehension with the methods of the study; instead, com-
prehension is just measured empirically. Rathert proposes to use semantic
models from FrameNet that allow these predictions and that open up the
margin for an automatized comprehension analysis.

Part 2: Identifying the criminal: the contribution of phonetics and text/ cor-
pus linguistics

The example of the blackmailing letter from above already highlighted the
topic of part 2: identifying the criminal. The analysis of the blackmailer’s
letter is an example of author identification, and text/ corpus linguistics was
instrumental in solving the case. If the blackmailer would have used the
telephone instead of the letter, speaker identification would have been nec-
essary with the help of phonetics.
MICHAEL JESSEN’s paper Forensic phonetics and the influence of speak-
ing style on global measures of fundamental frequency presents results of a
study in which 100 German-speaking men produced read and spontaneous
speech under normal and increased vocal loudness. The focus lies on the
difference in speaking style between read and spontaneous speech and how
it influences fundamental frequency (f0) behavior. On the average across
all 100 speakers, mean f0 was higher in spontaneous than read speech, but
this difference was significant only within the loud speech condition. Sec-
ondly, f0 variability was higher in spontaneous than read speech; this effect
was significant only within normal-loudness speech. These results are
compared to those in the literature. Most frequently in the literature, mean
f0 is higher in read than in spontaneous speech; the opposite was found in
the study. However, several studies concur with the present results. As a
possible explanation for the discrepancies it is argued that psychological
stress, which usually raises f0, acts as an intervening variable. For some
speakers or in some experimental settings, the reading task is more stressful
whereas for other speakers or settings, the spontaneous speech task is the
more stressful one. A similar discussion is provided for f0 variability,
which was investigated less frequently in the literature. Forensically it is
concluded that if no strong influence from stress or other intervening fac-
8 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

tors occurs, average and variability of fundamental frequency are very simi-
lar in read and spontaneous speech.
The paper Phonetic cues to speaker age: A longitudinal study, ANGE-
LIKA BRAUN and SEFAN FRIEBIS is on speaker age, the estimation of which
forms an essential element in forensic speaker profiling and voice compari-
son. The processes going on within the human vocal apparatus with in-
creasing age are of prime interest to any forensic phonetician. Specifically,
if any reference material for a given speaker is non-contemporary, the issue
of its usability for forensic speaker identification purposes arises fre-
quently. While there is an abundance of cross-sectional studies on the sub-
ject of vocal manifestation of speaker age (different subject groups at dif-
ferent ages), there is a striking paucity of longitudinal studies. Only the
latter will of course truly represent developments within the individual
speaker. The study presented by Braun and Friebis focuses on the devel-
opment of famous voices over time, the recordings of whom are readily
available over a considerable time span. The voices of eight male German
politicians were selected for the study. Recordings extending over a period
of 20–30 years were obtained from the archives of various German radio
stations. The variables studied were speech rate, mean fundamental fre-
quency, its standard deviation, voice onset time (VOT), and jitter and
shimmer. The main results indicate that the speech rate clearly decreases
with advancing age. The VOT measurements demonstrate a decrease with
increasing age. Shimmer shows a statistically significant increase with age.
With respect to the forensic setting, the results of the present study dem-
onstrate that certain changes within the vocal apparatus as well as changes
in speech timing can reliably be linked to the age of a given speaker.
The topic of the next paper is also age, but the age of writers, not of
speakers. JAN SEIFERT’s paper Does speech reveal one’s age? On the use
of gerontolinguistic topics for forensic authorship analysis discusses to
what extent the findings of gerontolinguistics can be utilized for forensic
linguistic purposes. There are only few and only very general considera-
tions on potential age markers in the forensic linguistic literature. Re-
searchers often confine themselves to the categories ‘young person’, ‘ma-
ture-aged adult’ and ‘old person’. As criteria they propose fashion words,
the use of phraseologisms and patterns of word formation. The synony-
mous adjectives geil, toll and knorke may serve as examples of diachroni-
cally marked lexemes, representing contemporary (geil), established (toll)
and antiquated (knorke) usage. Inferring the age of writers from diachroni-
cally labelled linguistic elements seems to be plausible; nonetheless, it is
lacking a theoretical foundation. Whereas research on German youth lan-
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 9

guage has become common since the late 19th century, gerontolinguistics
started only in the nineties of the 20th century. Seifert discusses the forensic
relevance of recent findings from gerontolinguistics as well as from areal
linguistics, which also carries out longitudinal studies. In many cases, lex-
emes belong to different registers and cannot be used as diagnostics; this
can be shown for geil and knorke. Geil is common among young people
(where it is nearly synonymous with kraß or fett), it is not ‘contemporary’
in the sense of standard German. Knorke is marked diachronically, diatopi-
cally and diastratically as Berlin colloquiual German of the 1920ies.

Part 3: Organizing legal systems: the contribution of computational linguis-

tics and artificial intelligence

The database with blackmailing letters at the BKA has already been men-
tioned. Databases are only one possibility of organizing legal systems; an-
other possibility is the application of tools from computational linguistics
and artificial intelligence. These tools can be useful to handle terminology,
to retrieve information, or to model legal theorizing in a formal system.
Part 3 demonstrates a variety of examples in these fields.
STEPHAN WALTER’s paper Definition Extraction from Court Decisions
Using Computational Linguistic Technology scrutinizes definitions in court
decisions. Discussions in court are in large parts devoted to pinning down
whether certain concepts apply. Central arguments are definitions or defini-
tion-like statements. Controversies arise because not all relevant concepts
are defined within statutes, and because the terms used in legal definitions
are often in need of clarification themselves. This is true for principled
reasons for evaluative concepts such as significant value. However, even
relatively concrete descriptive concepts, such as water or electricity often
need to be supported with further definitions in courts’ decisions. Definiti-
ons are open to revision, still they remain binding beyond the case at hand.
Easy access to definitions in decisions is thus of great importance to the
legal practitioner. Judges need to know such definitions in order to achieve
a uniform application of the law over time, and lawyers may be provided
with valuable arguments to make their clients’ case. Finally, definition
extraction is a prerequisite to building up an information system that allows
for concept-centered access to the interpretational knowledge spread over
court documents. First, Walter presents a corpus-based survey of the vari-
ous realizations of definitions in court decisions. He then provides a struc-
tural segmentation scheme for definitions and discusses a method of apply-
10 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

ing computational linguistic analysis techniques for their text-based extrac-

tion and automatic segmentation. Finally, Walter shows that a large number
of definitions can in fact be extracted at high precision using this method,
and that the quality of extraction results can be improved with an induced
ranking. Walter also discusses methods for acquiring further extractor pat-
terns automatically.
As in the previous paper, information extraction is also at issue in Mak-
ing sense of legal texts. However, EMILE DE MAAT, RADBOUD WINKELS
and TOM VAN ENGERS do not have a focus on definitions. Instead, they
treat the overall translation of legal texts into a formal machine executable
language; this translation process is called ‘making sense’. The authors
develop an inter-coder independent and repeatable procedure for translating
the legal sources into formal representations, leading to more uniformity
and consequently better maintainability of the systems that are based upon
those representations. The process of ‘making sense’ of legal texts is di-
vided into three steps: first, structuring the text; second, identifying the
source and its references; third, interpreting. In the past, legal texts were
hardly structured in a systematic way. Nowadays this is less of a problem;
even XML formats are often available. The authors use a parser based on a
context-free grammar for this purpose. Once the source is structured, the
next step is identifying which legal source it actually is, of which type (leg-
islation, case law or legal doctrine for instance) and resolve all references,
both internally and to external other legal sources. The authors use parsing
techniques to perform this task. When we have a structured source with
known identity and resolved references, we can start interpreting the text
meaning. The authors tackle this problem in two steps: (a) Use parsing
techniques to suggest translations from single provisions to formal model
fragments, and (b) integrate these model fragments into a single model
representing the entire legal source.
DORIS LIEBWALD’s paper Interfacing between different legal systems
using the examples of N-Lex and EUR-Lex is about information retrieval in
the legal domain. Since the classic “Handbook of Legal Information Re-
trieval” was published in 1984, improvement in legal information retrieval
has not seen any major advancement. Quite to the contrary, information
overload and increased demand for cross-national and cross-lingual legal
information have amplified the basic problems. The handbook already
points out many of the shortcomings a lawyer typically has to struggle with
when searching for relevant legal documents. Legal information retrieval
systems still do not represent legal structural and conceptual knowledge,
user friendliness regarding search strategies and input formats is lacking,
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 11

and information about system functions and information content is often

not sufficient. Liebwald demonstrates and explains the typical shortcom-
ings of legal information retrieval systems. Since the emphasis is on multi-
lingual and cross-national information retrieval, the experimental prototype
N-Lex, the new common access portal for national law, EUR-Lex, the
gateway to EU law, and the N-Lex and EUR-Lex implemented EUROVOC
thesaurus serve as case study examples. These applications are maintained
by the Office for Official Publications of the EC and are freely available on
the internet. Whereas EUR-Lex supplies legal texts produced by the EU
institutions, N-Lex is a new attempt to provide a common gateway to the
national law of the EU member states. In its current state, N-Lex is an ex-
perimental prototype which is publicly available on the internet for free test
use.
LOIS Project and Beyond is the topic of ERICH SCHWEIGHOFER’s paper;
as the previous paper, multilingual information retrieval is at issue. The
main task of the EU-funded e-Content LOIS project (Lexical Ontologies for
legal Information Sharing) was the building of a multilingual legal Word-
Net for the purpose of facilitating legal information retrieval. Thesaurus
and lexical ontologies research were used to develop a crosslingual ontol-
ogy with 5000 thesaurus entries in seven languages in order to improve
crosslingual legal information retrieval. This approach could face the prob-
lem of lack of knowledge of a certain language that prevents users from
formulating queries, and thus from finding relevant results but also provide
some support to lawyers having to cope with EU's multilingualism. Manual
construction of concepts and automatic extraction of legal definitions from
European directives were used for creating this lexical ontology. The LOIS
WordNet consists of both lexical and legal definitions. With this approach,
crosslingual information could be attained both on a more general, lexical
level, and on a more specific, legal level. Lexical definitions were trans-
lated manually on the basis of JurWordNet and its English translation. Le-
gal definitions were based on the authoritative language versions of all
European regulations and directives. This offered the possibility of intro-
ducing an equivalence relation between legal concepts in different lan-
guages. An equivalence relation and a near-equivalence relation (for related
concepts) established links between concepts in different languages. If no
equivalence or near-equivalence relation was present, analogous hierarchi-
cal structures could help in finding relations between terms in different
languages; for instance in comparative law research.
12 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

Part 4: Multilingualism and the law: the contribution of translation studies

The last two papers from the previous part already alluded to the topic of
part 4, multilingualism and the law. The European legislation is a product
of legal and linguistic diversity, as the member states do not only differ in
languages but also in their legal systems; two papers in this part treat EU’s
multilingualism. Another paper shows how Switzerland handles its multi-
lingualism in legal drafting. The input of translation studies is of course
vital in this field of research.
KARIN LUTTERMANN’s paper Multilingualism in the European Union.
Status quo and perspectives: The reference language model features the
“Language Babel of Brussels” and the linguistic integration of Europe.
“Unity in diversity” is the motto of the European Union, thus EU language
law is in a tension: To preserve the national identity of each member state
and meet the requirements of everyday communication. In practice, the
limits of the translation services and also their costs are remarkable. The
Community authorities and independent European institutions such as the
Trademark Office and the Court of Auditors already reduce the general use
of official and working languages to a great degree, in order to be able to
work efficiently. In the long run, the EU is unthinkable without a working
language regulation. In statistics: The EU comprises more than 450 million
inhabitants, 23 official languages and 506 language combinations. The
central part of Luttermann’s paper deals with the reference language model,
which takes maximal account of cultural identities. The reference language
model is a system consisting of reference languages and mother tongues.
The European legal acts are translated at all levels (treaty, official, working
languages and languages of a case) authentically into two reference lan-
guages. This necessitates translation right from the start, which is method-
ologically the means for intercultural communication. The model is devel-
oped from a legal-linguistic perspective and is founded on the mother
tongue basis, the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, the neces-
sary legal certainty and in contradistinction to conventional language mod-
els.
In her paper Drafting and interpretation of EU law – paradoxes of legal
multilingualism, AGNIESZKA DOCZEKALSKA explains why and how multi-
lingual law is paradoxical. On the one hand, no two languages are identical;
syntax and morphology vary from language to language. The semantics of
a word in one language rarely matches exactly with the semantics of its
closest equivalent in another language, not to mention words that are un-
translatable. Hence, if there can be no absolute correspondence between
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 13

languages, two and especially more than two language versions of the same
text cannot be identical and some, at least, slight divergences are inevitable.
On the other hand, the semantic equivalence of all the authentic language
versions of a legal act is the main presumption of legal multilingualism and
the prerequisite of the existence and functioning of multilingual law. In
other words, all language versions of a legal act should have the same
meaning. The law of the European Union expressed in twenty-three and
soon possibly in more languages is an interesting example of such a para-
dox. Doczekalska demonstrates that the paradoxes of legal multilingualism
appear when the practice of production and application of multilingual law
is confronted with legal requirements and presumptions stemming from the
principle of equal authenticity. Doczekalska demonstrates that legal re-
quirements and the practice of legal multilingualism are more congruent
than may appear at first glance. The insight into the drafting process and
application of multilingual law and the thorough comprehension of the
principle of equal authenticity reveals that contradictions creating para-
doxes are to large extent just ostensible.
Like the previous two papers in this part, ANDREAS LÖTSCHER’s paper
Multilingual law drafting in Switzerland deals with multilingualism, but not
on the European level. Instead, the conditions and problems of multilingual
law drafting in Switzerland are discussed. The paper is full of examples of
law drafting and has its merits in showing authentic empirical material.
Apart from Switzerland, there are only a few other multilingual states and
institutions that have established forms of multilingual legislation, above all
Canada, Belgium and the European Union. The closest case to Switzerland
is Canada, which has, however, other traditions of laws and legislation,
with a mixture between civil law and common law. The European Union
with its unique political and linguistic structure has developed its own spe-
cial informal and formal procedures in negotiating and elaborating enact-
ments. One may doubt whether the European Union has procedures of mul-
tilingual law drafting in a strict sense, as acts are often drafted in one or two
languages only and translated later into the other languages. In this sense,
Switzerland is a unique case, too, both in its policies of multilingualism and
its traditions of legislation and legal language. Nevertheless, it seems worth
to have a closer look at it, as in Switzerland, due to its tradition of direct
democracy and having a multitude of language minorities, a high degree of
consciousness of the problems of multilingualism has been developed, and
the necessity of a good quality of the language of laws has resulted in spe-
cific methods of quality assurance. Thus, Switzerland may represent a pro-
totypical case for demonstrating general problems. The paper presents re-
14 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

flections on the daily work and the practical problems of law drafting in
Switzerland.
A modular approach to legal drafting and translation is the topic of
JACQUELINE VISCONTI’s paper. Most literature discussing multilingualism
and translation in the legal domain focuses on terminological issues. The
problems at stake revolve around questions such as: is the translation of
terms mirroring different legal conceptions legitimate? How is a term used
in a European Union context related to the corresponding terminology in a
national context? Lawyers, in particular, comparatists, have been reflecting
on the translation of terms such as trust, contract, property, etc. across legal
systems. Visconti, however, widens and deepens the scope of reflection to
other linguistic structures of legal texts. The problematic character of legal
translation is shown to concern not only terminology, but also the semantic
relationships expressed by connectives linking the propositions of a text. A
fine-grained analysis of all linguistic levels of legal texts is argued to be a
prerequisite for both translation and a good drafting practice in multilingual
contexts. The analysis is grounded in a modular approach, where lexical,
morphosyntactic and textual levels are seen as autonomous yet interacting
modules. The textual dimension in its various facets (logical, argumenta-
tive, and informational) is shown to be of primary importance in shaping
form and function of legal documents. Visconti’s attempt to formalize the
modular descriptions as lexical entries or information unit labels makes the
proposal suitable to computational implementation.

3. Research projects on ‘Language and Law’

After having sketched the content of the parts, we want to broaden the view
on the topic of the book by presenting an overview about the most impor-
tant past and current research projects in Germany and abroad, cf. also
Rathert (2006: 87ff.).
The oldest project on ‘Language and Law’ is the Deutsches
Rechtswörterbuch (www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~cd2/drw/). It was
founded 1896 at the former Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissen-
schaften and is still going on, now located at the Heidelberger Akademie
der Wissenschaften. The Rechtswörterbuch treats legal terms from the be-
ginning of the written tradition in Latin official documents in the Migration
Period, also called Barbarian Invasions or Völkerwanderung until 1800.
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 15

In Germany, an intensive cooperation between jurists and linguists

started in the 1970ies, when the language of law and administration was
investigated in terms of comprehensibility and citizen-friendliness.
The project Schlichtung – Gesprächs- und Interaktionsanalyse eines
Verfahrens zur Lösung sozialer Konflikte (1983–1990, conducted by
Werner Kallmeyer and Werner Nothdurft) was located at the Institut für
Deutsche Sprache (IDS). This project investigated mediation as a complex
action pattern and described characteristic styles and variations of this pat-
tern. Relevant project publications include Nothdurft (1995), Nothdurft
(1997), Röhl (1987) and Schröder (1997).
Klaus F. Röhl, a jurist who was researcher in this project, later on was
principal investigator of a project funded by Volkswagenstiftung on Visuel-
le Rechtskommunikation (Bochum University, 2001–2003). Röhl tracked
the historical development of image and text in jurisprudence. The Roman
law was without any visual elements, but many legal texts from the Middle
Ages included images; e.g. the manuscript of the Herforder Rechtsbuch or
the Soester Nequam-Buch (14th century both). The legal texts with the rich-
est illustrations are the manuscripts of the Sachsenspiegel.
The Sachsenspiegel is the most important legal text in the Middle Ages.
It is also the first bigger legal text in German. The title Sachsenspiegel
(‘Saxons-mirror’) is an analogy; as one sees oneself in the mirror, so should
one see justice and injustice just by looking into the book. The original
Sachsenspiegel manuscript was written by Eike von Repgow between 1220
and 1235. Other legal texts were modelled on the Sachsenspiegel, e.g. the
Augsburger Sachsenspiegel, the Deutschenspiegel or the Schwabenspiegel.
In Prussia, the Sachsenspiegel was valid until common law was enacted in
1794; in Saxony, the Sachsenspiegel was in force even until 1865. Saxony-
Anhalt applied it until 1900 and it was cited in court decisions in Leipzig
until 1932.
The Sachsenspiegel contained two domains of law, the Landrecht
(roughly equivalent to today’s civil and crimial law) and the Lehnrecht
(comparable to today’s constitutional law). The Sachsenspiegel exists in the
form of 460 manuscripts, the prettiest being the ones from Heidelberg,
Oldenburg, Dresden and Wolfenbüttel. These four manuscripts were pro-
duced between 1295 and 1371; although they differ in many points, they all
display a unique combination of image and text. Each page is divided in
two columns for text and illustration; image and text illuminate each other
(cf. the arrows, pointing from the initials of the text to the illustrations):
16 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

Figure 3. Heidelberg Sachsenspiegel, part of the Lehnrecht, digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.

de/cpg164/0003, Cod. Pal. germ. 164, fol. 2r. With friendly permission
of Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

Today’s law is teached without images and illustrations of this kind; never-
theless, we live in a time where images play a major role in everyday life.
Images are eye-catching, they can also provide distraction; often they acti-
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 17

vate schematic knowledge. Eyewitnesses are prone to report details they

never saw, but which they added from their schematic world knowledge.
Despite the well-known fact that a picture may lie, people tend to trust im-
ages more than text. The distinctive property of text is abstraction, and if
this abstraction is reduced by adding concrete images, the outcome is un-
clear. Images have a scandalizing potential in the context of human rights
abuse or global environmental devastation. The U.S. is known for images
in court as a trigger for ‘court room dramas’, attracting both public and
media attention.
The Academy of Science at Berlin-Brandenburg established an interdis-
ciplinary research group with the permanent members Manfred Bierwisch,
Rainer Dietrich, Wolfgang Klein (principal investigator), Hans-Peter
Schwintowski, Dieter Simon and Christine Windbichler
(www.bbaw.de/sdr/). The aim of the group was to investigate the compre-
hension of legal texts by different individuals. As an example of a legal
text, the insurance conditions of a Riester-pension were chosen; Rathert's
paper in this volume reports on this study. The research group existed from
1999 to 2004, the findings are published as Dietrich and Klein (2000),
Klein (2002), Lerch (2004/2005), and Becker and Klein (2008).
Another project that is focused on the comprehensibility of legal texts is
the IDEMA project (Internet-Dienst für eine moderne Amtssprache) in
Bochum (www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/idema/). IDEMA started in 2006 and is
still going on. The theoretical part is carried out by Hans-Rüdiger Fluck
from the German department of Bochum University. Fluck cooperates with
Federal and Länder Authorities, with city administrations and with compa-
nies in optimizing the comprehensibility of legal texts.
There have been many interdisciplinary workshops on ‘Language and
Law’ in Germany, e.g. at the annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS), 1985 in Hamburg (cf. Hoffmann 1989) and
2006 in Bielefeld (this volume). The BKA organized conferences on foren-
sic linguistics and on authorship attribution in 1988 and 2000. The annual
meeting at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim in 2001
featured the topic ‘Language and Law’, cf. Haß-Zumkehr (2002). The Ge-
sellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik (GAL) has a section on languages for
special purposes at every annual meeting; in most cases, ‘Language and
Law’ is represented there.
There are many linguists and jurists in Germany who work on ‘Lan-
guage and Law’, but there is no umbrella organization and local initiatives
hardly cooperate. At the beginning of the 1970ies, an interdisciplinary
group ‘Analyse der juristischen Sprache’ existed; the ‘Heidelberger
18 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

Gruppe’ (www.recht-und-sprache.de/) has been founded in the 1980ies;

there is a ‘Regensburger Arbeitskreis’ founded in 2006 and a law-oriented
project in the Heidelberger Forschungsnetzwerk ‘Sprache und Wissen –
Probleme öffentlicher und professioneller Kommunikation’. Besides these
research oriented initiatives, there are some incorporated societies. The
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesetzgebung e.V. (www.dggev.de/, founded in
1987), is engaged on a better jurisdiction and advertizes a prize for a good
and effective law. The aim of the society Recht-Verständlich e.V.
(www.verein-rechtverstaendlich.de/, founded in 2005) is to explain those
parts of the law that are of everyday relevance; the society is oriented to-
wards new entrepreneurs and lay persons. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Kriminalistik e.V. (www.kriminalistik.info/) was founded in 2002 by lec-
turers of criminal sciences and lecturers from the police academy; it is more
or less fostering criminalistics in practice and research.
In 2009, Dieter Stein founded the e-journal Language and Law, hostet at
DIPP (Cologne), http://www.languageandlaw.de/. It is an open-access,
double-blind peer-reviewed e-journal which offers a forum for research on
the interdependence of language and law in all of its facets, from theoretical
approaches to the resolution of practical issues.
In the Anglo-American area, ‘Language and Law’ is defined and organ-
ized in a different manner. In most cases, the topic is identified with crimi-
nalistics, as an ancillary science of police investigation. In the U.S., the
biggest research ressources are federal, there are big forensic departments
at the FBI and other institutions; linguists work together with other crime
scene investigators. In Great Britain, the Forensic Science Service is even
part of the Home Office; its task is also supporting the police. Research on
‘Language and Law’ in the Anglo-American area is thus mostly forensic in
nature, with a focus on speaker or author identification.
The Anglo-American focus on the courtroom situation and everything
that is relevant there has a long tradition. Like in Germany, more intensive
collaboration of linguists and jurists started in the 1970ies. The project Law
and Language at Duke University was groundbreaking; it investigated
communication at court. The result was that those men and women who
were rated as untrustworthy by the jury used a special kind of language that
was hitherto classified as women-specific. It contained many hesitations,
hedges and politeness markers.
The well-known forensic work by Jan Svartvik and Malcolm Coulthard
also contributed to highlighting the usefulness of linguistics for jurists. The
rationale was the following: like a DNA test may prove the innocence of a
defendant, a linguistic-forensic report can do the same. Malcolm Coulthard
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 19

founded the International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis

in 2000 (www.forensiclinguistics.net/); its focus is forensic linguistics, it
takes place almost exclusively in Great Britain.
Many international research umbrella organizations in the field of ‘Lan-
guage and Law’ have their origin in the Anglo-American area. The Interna-
tional Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL, www.iafl.org/) was
founded in 1992 in Birmingham. It is an organization whose members have
some linguistic training (or, at least, are interested in language) and who
also have an interest in language and law. Members tend to do research in
areas like forensic linguistics (linguistic evidence and expertise), linguistic
interaction in the courtroom, analysis and interpretation of legal texts, court
interpreting, multilingualism, language policy, ethics of testifying on lin-
guistic matters, and corpus-based approaches to legal issues. The IAFL
holds a meeting once every two years; past conferences have been in Malta,
Australia, Great Britain, and Seattle. The International Association for
Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA, www.iafpa.net/) was founded
in York in 1991. The journal that is edited jointly by the IAFL and the
IAFPA is the International Journal of Speech, Language and Law (for-
merly Journal of Forensic Linguistics).
The Law and Society Association (LSA, www.lawandsociety.org/) was
founded in 1964 in the U.S. The LSA is a relatively large organization that
includes legal academics, sociologists, political scientists, and linguists.
The annual meetings of the LSA are also outside the U.S.; their focus is on
the interaction between law and politics, society, economy and culture.
The International Round Table for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL) is a
consolidation of the European, Greimas-oriented International Association
of the Semiotics of Law with the U.S. American Peirce-oriented Roundta-
ble for the Semiotics of Law. The focus of the organization is on different
forms of textual analysis to the discourses of the law, including the semiot-
ics of Greimas, Peirce and Lacan, rhetorics, visual semiotics, philosophy of
language, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and deconstructionism, as well as
more traditional legal philosophical approaches to the language of the law.
The journal edited by the IRSL is the International Journal for the Semiot-
ics of Law. The annual conferences of the IRSL alternate between Europe
and the Americas.
The Plain-English- or Plain-Language-Movement is devoted to improv-
ing the language of the legal profession. Many of its members are lawyers
and judges. These movements are located in the U.S., in Australia, Canada
and Great Britain. The goals of the movements include avoiding archaic,
obscure, and over-elaborate language in legal work; drafting legal docu-
20 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

ments in a language that is both certain in meaning and easily understand-

able; exerting a firm, responsible influence on the style of legal language,
with the hope of achieving a change in fashion.
There is a growing interest in law from computer science, language
technology and artificial intelligence. In Germany, this new research field
is still at the beginning; there are only very few chairs for legal informatics.
The German Association for Computing in the Judiciary (Deutscher EDV-
Gerichtstag e. V., edvgt.jura.uni-sb.de/) was founded in 1989 in Saarbrü-
cken and has become famous and important also outside of Germany. It
cooperates regularly with the Bund-Länder Commission; the association
develops standards for the XML-structuring of judgment transcripts in da-
tabases and fosters electronic data processing in the administration of jus-
tice, including advocacy.
In the Netherlands, the Leibniz Center for Law (www.leibnizcenter.org/,
cf. the paper by de Maat, Winkels and van Engers in this volume) develops
technology to support legal practice both in the private and in the public
sector. The Leibniz Center applies artificial intelligence techniques to
problems in legal theory, legal knowledge management and the field of law
in general. The Leibniz Center has experience in the development of legal
ontologies, automatic legal reasoning and legal knowledge-based systems,
(standard) languages for representing legal knowledge and information,
user-friendly disclosure of legal data, and the application of information
technology in education and legal practice.
The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (JURIX,
www.jurix.nl/) is a forum for researchers in the field of law and computer
science in the Netherlands and Flanders. Its members are research groups
from most Dutch universities and a Flemish university, KU Leuven. JURIX
organizes quarterly meetings that comprise of a number of lectures on
artificial intelligence and law topics from both academics and practitioners.
Since 1988, JURIX has held annual international conferences on legal
knowledge and information systems.
In Austria, the International Legal Informatics Symposium (IRIS) takes
place annually. IRIS is one of the largest academic conferences on com-
puters and law in Austria and central Europe; topics include e-government,
telecommunications law, e-tax and legal informatics.
Let us conclude with a huge European research project: Lexical Ontolo-
gies for legal Information Sharing (LOIS, www.loisproject.org/, cf. also the
paper by Schweighofer in this volume). The aim of the LOIS project is to
develop a multilingual access facility for European legal databases. This
will enable citizens and professional users to search for European legisla-
 Language and Law – new applications of formal linguistics 21

tion and other legal documents (such as court cases) across six European
languages (Italian, English, German, Czech, Portuguese and Dutch). To
achieve this goal, the project uses formal representations of the WordNet
technique. Similar concepts in different languages (synsets) are cross-
linked in such a way that users can enter queries to a legal documentation
base in his/her language and retrieve also documents written in different
languages. The research results are taken on by the industry partners in the
LOIS consortium to develop actual information products for European citi-
zens.

4. References

Becker, Angelika and Wolfgang Klein. 2008. Recht verstehen. Wie Laien, Juristen
und Versicherungsagenten die “Riester-Rente” interpretieren. Berlin:
Akademie.
Coulthard, Malcolm and Janet Cotterill. 2004. Introducing forensic linguistics.
London: Routledge.
Dern, Christa. 2003. “Sprachwissenschaft und Kriminalistik: zur Praxis der Auto-
renerkennung”. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 31. 44–77.
Dietrich, Rainer and Wolfgang Klein. 2000. “Sprache des Rechts”. Themenheft der
‘Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik’ 118 (30). Stuttgart:
Metzler.
Gibbons, John. 2005. Forensic linguistics: an introduction to language in the jus-
tice system. Oxford: Blackwell.
Grewendorf, Günther (ed.) 1992. Rechtskultur als Sprachkultur. Zur forensischen
Funktion der Sprachanalyse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Haft, Fritjof. 1986. Aus der Waagschale der Justitia. Ein Lesebuch aus 2000 Jah-
ren Rechtsgeschichte. München: C.H.Beck.
Haß-Zumkehr, Ulrike (ed.) 2002. Sprache und Recht. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Hoffmann, Ludger (ed.) 1989. Rechtsdiskurse. Untersuchungen zur Kommunikati-
on in Gerichtsverfahren. Tübingen: Narr.
Klein, Wolfgang (ed.) 2002. “Sprache des Rechts II”. Themenheft der ‘Zeitschrift
für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik’, 128 (32). Stuttgart: Metzler.
Kniffka, Hannes. 1981. “Der Linguist als Gutachter bei Gericht. Überlegungen und
Materialien zu einer ‘Angewandten Soziolinguistik’”. Angewandte
Sprachwissenschaft. Grundfragen – Bereiche – Methoden, ed. by Günter
Peuser and Stefan Winter, Bonn: Bouvier. 584–634.
Kniffka, Hannes (ed.) 1990. Texte zu Theorie und Praxis forensischer Linguistik.
Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Lerch, Kent (ed.) 2004/ 2005. Sprache des Rechts. 3 Bände. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
22 Günther Grewendorf and Monika Rathert

Levi, Judith N. 1994. Language and law. A bibliographic guide to social science
research in the USA. Chicago: American Bar Association.
Nothdurft, Werner (ed.) 1995. Streit schlichten. Gesprächsanalytische Untersu-
chungen zu institutionellen Formen konsensueller Konfliktregelung. Ber-
lin: Walter de Gruyter.
Nothdurft, Werner. 1997. Konfliktstoff – Gesprächsanalyse der Konfliktbearbei-
tung in Schlichtungsgesprächen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Nussbaumer, Markus. 1997. Sprache und Recht. Heidelberg: Groos.
Olsson, John. 2004. Forensic Linguistics. An Introduction to Language, Crime,
and the Law. London: Continuum.
Rathert, Monika. 2006. Sprache und Recht. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
Reitemeier, Ulrich. 1985. Studien zur juristischen Kommunikation. Eine kommen-
tierte Bibliographie. Tübingen: Narr.
Röhl, Klaus Friedrich (ed.) 1987. Das Güteverfahren vor dem Schiedsmann. Sozio-
logische und kommunikationswissenschaftliche Untersuchungen. Köln:
Carl Heymanns.
Schröder, Peter (ed.) 1997. Schlichtungsgespräche. Ein Textband mit einer exem-
plarischen Analyse. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Wesel, Uwe. 2002. Fast alles, was Recht ist. Jura für Nichtjuristen. Frankfurt am
Main: Eichborn.
Wesel, Uwe. 2006. Geschichte des Rechts. München: C.H.Beck.
Part 1

Understanding the law:

The contribution of semantics and
psycholinguistics
Law matters, syntax matters and semantics matters

Carl Vogel

1. Background

For decades, people have taken automatic spelling checking for granted,
and become increasingly accepting of the diagnostics provided by auto-
mated grammar checkers and style monitors. The next tool in the progres-
sion will be automatic meaning checkers to spot ambiguity, vagueness,
(in)consistency, absurdity.1 An assumption of this paper is that one role of
the semanticist during the intervening period is to do the work that auto-
mated meaning checkers would do: dispassionately digest the composite
meaning of texts (drawing on appropriately explicit contexts) to mark the
locations within the texts that may have undesired implication. Where the
text is of a legal nature, a difference between a semanticist and a lawyer is
that the semanticist is not on retainer to find a desired interpretation, but to
enumerate the possibilities. From among those possibilities, a judge must
make a selection. A recent report on statutory drafting in Ireland articulates
a clear aesthetic (The Law Reform Committee 2000: 8):

(1) Clearly, the ideal to be pursued in law should be that a particular

legal question will always be resolved in the same way, irrespective
of which judge hears the case. Of course, this ideal is not always
achievable in practice. However, the law should be designed in
such a way as to make it more, rather than less, likely to happen.

1. That this claim is not ridiculous finds evidence in the fact that sentiment analysis
is an enormous activity using the tools of corpus linguistics. The “Recognising
Textual Entailment Challenge”, organized by the PASCAL Pattern Analysis, Sta-
tistical Modelling and Computational Learning network (http://www.pascal-net-
work.org/Challenges/RTE3/ – last verified, February 2009) provides stronger evi-
dence that this is a concrete possibility.

G. Grewendorf and M. Rathert (eds.): Formal Linguistics and Law, 25–54

© Berlin, New York: Mouton deGruyter
26 Carl Vogel

Thus, the semanticist's most natural partner is on the legal drafting team. It
has been noted that the language of law is constructed using devices akin to
those in logic programming (e.g. Kowalski 1992), and the drafting team
independently operates with formal guidelines, logical connectives and op-
erators. However, sometimes the drafted text would benefit from a formal-
ist's perusal and comment. Notwithstanding issues of interpretation that
involve issues external to the text of laws (see §2), the text remains para-
mount. The Law Reform Committee (2000: 10) points out, “It is important
to state, at the outset, that the literal rule [of interpretation] is, and must re-
main, the general governing principle in this area: anything else would lead
to chaos.”
Consider the extant relationships between linguists and the legal system.
Chaski (1997) noted that the reluctance of courts to accept expert linguistic
opinion, at least in the case of authorship attribution, derived from the
methods often failing the Daubert test of admissibility of expert evidence.
Expert evidence must be drawn from methods that are scientific in the
sense of having been subject to empirical evaluation, with established crite-
ria for applicability, conduct, and quantification of certainty; reliable in the
sense that anyone performing the analysis would reach the same conclu-
sions; and acknowledged as valid in the scientific community through peer
reviewed publication.2 However, despite an acknowledged reluctance of
courts to accept expert linguistic opinion (particularly on the meaning of
ordinary English expressions in statutes or contracts, for example), Tiersma
and Solan (2002) point out several areas of linguistics in which judges have
been known to accept expert witness: second language interpretation, dia-
lectology, proficiency assessment, phonetics. In other areas, such as read-
ability evaluation and semantics of natural language for statutory interpre-
tation, expert testimony from linguists has been less welcome.
Solan (1993) notes that judges often explicitly appeal to linguistic prin-
ciples of interpretation in justifying legal opinions and decisions, yet incon-
sistently. A number of interpretive rules that he discusses involve ambigui-
ties of syntax and semantics, including anaphora. Consider the large issue
that Solan raises is about the “and/or” rule, which is that in some jurisdic-
tions (e.g. New York), an interpretation statute specifies that the two words

2. In her own work, she has investigated the reliability of methods (Chaski 2001)
for authorship attribution, and has suggested letter unigram distributions as a level
of linguistic description that will at least achieve reliability.
 Law matters, syntax matters and semantics matters 27

may be used interchangeably. The examples (2–5) demonstrate the com-

mon usage which makes this rational.

(2) At the conference dinner tonight, you can have stuffed artichoke
with asparagus and also lamb chops with mashed potatoes.
(3) Would you like olives, or pretzels, or crisps, or beer or anything?
(4) You must not smoke or eat in the library.
(5) You must not smoke and you must not eat in the library.

In (2) the interaction of and with the modal can is such that there is a con-
joint possibility of two different dinners, but the natural interpretation is
that there is an “either/or but not both” for any actual dinner choice. Stacy
(2005) discusses the issue with respect to the phrase prohibiting “cruel and
unusual punishment”, where many prefer to interpret the phrase as if and
had been or. Similarly, in (3) there is no presumed exclusivity of the op-
tions, thus they may naturally in many settings all be conjointly accepted.
The De Morgan's equivalences entail that (4) implies (5). It is not that or
and and are synonyms, but examples like those motivate the interpretive
rule. That anaphor resolution rules may be inconsistently applied is no sur-
prise. It is even less a surprise that the “and/or” rule could lead to litigation.
Adams and Kaye (2006) describe at length and depth the ambiguities that
emerge in the interpretation of “and” and “or”, as a function of the gram-
matical category of constituents that those connectives join.
Adams and Kaye (2006) also discuss the ambiguity of plurals. One issue
is whether provisions associated with plurals are meant to apply collec-
tively or distributively over each individual. Coles-Bjerre (2006) demon-
strates the consequences of this ambiguity with respect to transfer of money
to creditors in the context of bankruptcy. This discussion independently
draws out in the legal context of disbursal of funds to creditors in the con-
text of bankruptcy the fact that there is not a clear dichotomy between col-
lective and fully distributive readings of plurals (Verkuyl 1994). In coarse
terms, “three creditors received one hundred dollars” is a true sentence if
two received forty-five each, and one received ten; it is also true if three
creditors received one hundred dollars each; and so on. It is slightly taxing
to imagine all of the permutations of distribution that make such a state-
ment true, but it easy to see that there are many. The Irish Interpretation
Act (2005) makes statement about plurals and singulars, but one that cannot
be read as providing a rule on how distributivity is meant to be resolved
(see (6)).
28 Carl Vogel

(6) Section 18 (a)

Singular and plural. A word importing singular shall be read as also
importing the plural, and a word importing the plural shall be read
as also importing the singular.

To see this, consider the Constitution of Ireland again. Article 45 §2 states,

“The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing: –”

(7) Art 45 §2 (ii)

That the ownership and control of the material resources of the
community may be so distributed amongst private individuals and
the various classes as best to subserve the common good.

In order to effect full distributivity, some quantification invoking “each”

private individual and class would be necessary. Here, what is “best to sub-
serve the common good” is left open and vague, with a rather large number
of configurations of distribution to choose from.
Another principle of interpretation is called “the last antecedent rule”
and meant to address scope ambiguity if conditions applying to complex
clauses arising from structural attachment ambiguity. Solan (1993: 29)3
provides the formal statement of the rule: “A limiting clause is to be con-
fined to the last antecedent, unless the context or evident meaning requires
a different construction.” Rather than discussing the particulars of the case
around which he makes the point, one can see the import from (8), a sche-
matic of the case, a and b are potential distinct individuals with some
shared quality p; 3 is a proviso associated with the predicate p; and : is an
outcome that follows if the non-atomic antecedent of (8) is satisfied.

(8) p(a) š (p(b) š a z b) š Ȇ o ȍ

(9) (p(a) š (p(b) š a z b) š Ȇ)
(10) ((p(a) š (p(b) š a z b)) š Ȇ)

This issue is that the natural language counterpart also lacks bracketing.
The rule dictates the disambiguation in (9) while (10) also provides a natu-

3. He has quoted directly from Anderson vs. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insur-
ance Co. 75 California Reporter 739, 741 (2nd District 1969).
 Law matters, syntax matters and semantics matters 29

ral interpretation, in which the proviso is a condition on the entire prior

conjoint phrase.

(11) The possibility of admission is available to girls and boys under six
years of age.

It is more natural to read (11) as requiring all of the children to be under six
years of age, and not just the boys, although, of course, both readings are
available. Solan demonstrates that judges are not consistent in their applica-
tion of these interpretive rules, even though they are accepted interpretive
principles. The key issue that is at stake is that the when the rules are ap-
plied, the judge tends to argue that the decision is based upon a linguistic
rule of interpretation, and when the rule is not applied, it is drawn on legis-
lative intent or other extra-textual considerations, when actually in both
cases, the reasons for the decision are likely to be exterior to the texts, and
happen to be consistent with a linguistic rule in the former.
This article is largely an exercise in meaning checking over legal texts.
Schane (2002) provides a comparable look at case law demonstrating lexi-
cal ambiguity, reference resolution dispute, and vagueness, in developing
an argument for subjective, purposive, interpretation of legal texts. The dif-
ferent issues considered here in §3 also highlight forms of ambiguity, but
with the intent of arguing for the role of natural language semanticists
working with legal experts in the drafting process particularly, and also in-
terpretation. Of course, the scope of formal semantic approaches to texts
has advanced a great deal since Tarskian foundations – contexts are rele-
vant, and not just for anaphora resolution, but also, and particularly, for the
interpretation of plain language.
The article mainly (but not exclusively) addresses Irish constitutional
and statutory issues, not because the Irish situation is markedly different
from any other jurisdiction, but because it is ready to hand for the author.
The discussion involves close readings of texts for reasonable, literal eve-
ryday meanings, and Section 2 is provided to acknowledge the thorough
awareness within the legal domain of theoretical and practical ramifications
of exercises like this.
30 Carl Vogel

2. Principles of drafting and interpreting text

The principles that guide legal drafting and interpretation have been out-
lined and evaluated in countless monographs and articles. The purpose of
this section is to highlight issues that are germane to the textual focus of §3.
In particular, a natural response to some of the readings that are perhaps
unintended by the drafters is to argue that some other purposive form of
interpretation would rule the reading out, or some other interpretive rule
would override in face of absurdity. Thus, the main role of this section is to
highlight what some of those remedies might be. However, as noted in §1,
where alternatives have equal support, it is likely that inconsistent resolu-
tions would emerge, depending on the adjudicator.

2.1 Basic principles

A number of basic principles guide the understanding of texts, where a de-

cision might be made from them, at odds with their literal contents. The
Law Reform Committee (2000) distinguishes between literal and purposive
rules. One example is the “mischief rule”, which is called into play when a
blatant error has emerged, for example via printing error. Another is the
“golden rule” which is used when literal interpretation leads to an absurd
meaning or inconsistency. Other rules address literal issues associated with
polysemy. “A word is known by its associates” (noscitur a sociis) provides
a dictum to take context into account, thus partly resolving lexical ambigu-
ity. “Of the same kind” (ejusdem generis) addresses the absence of words,
such that if constraints are placed on a series of explicitly named items,
then they apply to other instances of the same kind.4 However, a contrast-
ing rule applied to cases rather than kinds works differently (expressio
unius est exclusio alterius) in that a statute constraining one situation with-
out mentioning a related situation is not allowed to automatically be gener-
alized to cover the related case. Another basic principle (generalia spe-
cialibus non derogant) is that a general provision can be explicitly canceled
through a statute applying to a more specific set of situations. These are
basic principles that come to mind when addressing textual oddities in stat-

4. This limited open world assumption works against the construal of law as logic
programs, which generally operate on a closed world assumption (see mention of
Kowalski (1992) above).
 Law matters, syntax matters and semantics matters 31

utes. One considers that one or more of them will resolve the oddity. How-
ever, because there is not a unique solution, one is left with a situation in
which different adjudicators will achieve different conclusions when inter-
preting the relevant text.

2.2 Drafting clarity

As noted in the introduction, it is desirable for interpretation to be reliable

in the sense of not depending significantly on which person does the inter-
preting, and (1) “the law should be designed in such a way as to make it
more, rather than less, likely to happen” that way.
Style guides exist for legal drafting, of course, with guidelines to be
clear, unambiguous, avoid complex constructions, and so on. The Law Re-
form Committee (2000: Ch. 6.) proposed guidelines for statutory drafting in
Ireland, suggesting that it should follow the principles encapsulated in (12)

(12) 1. Familiar vocabulary should be used in legislative drafting

2. Shorter sentences should be used in legislative drafting
3. Complex and obscure sentence structures should be avoided
4. Excessive cross reference among sections should be avoided
5. Unnecessary concepts should be avoided5
6. Examples should be provided
7. Maps, diagrams and mathematical formulae should be employed6

A specific thread of legal drafting thought involves the ideal of plain lan-
guage that laypeople can understand. Notwithstanding the fact that plain
language is the normal discourse that semanticists address, lawyers have
also made significant critiques of this aesthetic. Tanner (2004), for exam-

5. This refers to constructions like “the relevant period” which tend to require cross
reference outside the explicit provision, and thus, it is claimed, “obscure the sig-
nificance” (p. 75). While acknowledging that over-precision is counter-productive,
it does seem like exactly qualifications of “the relevant period” are the stuff of liti-
gation and should be made precise to the greatest extent possible. Witness the dis-
pute between Larry Silverstein and the insurers of the World Trade Center, and the
billions of dollars that depended on whether there was one event or two.
6. For example, it is much clearer to stipulate the manner by which compensation
among multiple parties is to be calculated using mathematical formulae than to
describe the algorithm in natural language sentences.
32 Carl Vogel

ple, considers the style guide of Butts and Castle (2001), and complains
that the notion of favoring “small meaning bites” is ill-defined, although
the intuition behind it is sensible enough.7 Hunt (2002) draws attention to
an analogy between medical doctors and lawyers. Medical jargon is not put
into plain language either, because it would not abet efficient communica-
tion among experts. So, too, with lawyers, the argument goes. However, it
is not so clear that one should reasonably expect settling an insurance claim
oneself to be as prohibitively involved as reading the instructions to per-
form surgery on oneself.
An uncontested dimension of clarity is that terms should be defined
within statutes where neologisms, and more particularly, ordinary words,
are provided with senses peculiar to the statutory domain. The first section
of statutory acts is devoted to this. For the discussion which follows in §3,
it is relevant to provide some of the articles of the Irish constitutions as ex-
amples (13–15). These articles define the nation, the state, the national lan-
guage and the official languages of Ireland.

(13) Article 1
The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible, and
sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to deter-
mine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, politi-
cal, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and
traditions.
(14) Article 4
The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland.
(15) Article 8
1. The Irish language as the national language is the first official
language.
2. The English language is recognised as a second official language.
3. Provision may, however, be made by law for the exclusive use of
either of the said languages for any one or more official purposes,
either throughout the State or in any part thereof.

7. Nonetheless, Tanner (2006) applies this to the EC Directive 2002/2/EC of the

European Parliament, and finds it lacking in exactly this respect. The directive is of
28 January 2002, and amends Council Directive 79/373/EEC, which set rules on
“circulation of compound feeding stuffs within the Community.”
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