Semantyczne aspekty gramatyki tekstów prawnych – zjawisko nominalizacji

• Authors: Zeifert Mateusz

Title variants

EN

Semantic Aspects of the Grammar of Legal Texts – the Phenomenon of Nominalization

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The aim of this article is to investigate nominalization – a very common phenomenon in the language of legal texts, and to show that it is not entirely grammatical, but also semantic. Nominalization can be described as a type of word formation in which a verb, an adjective or other part of speech is used as a noun, with or without morphological transformation. The language of legal texts is full of such derivative nouns, as they are very convenient for legislative drafting, i.e. they can be used in different syntactic functions. As a drawback they can cause syntactic ambiguity and are responsible for infamous “density” of legal texts. However, their popularity should not be associated only with their functionality. Contemporary linguistic theories, such as Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, offer interesting insights into the semantic roots of the phenomenon of nominalization. It seems that nominalization reflects some important ways we think about law, legal procedures and institutions. These semantic aspects of nominalization should not be neglected in legislative drafting.

• Publisher: Kancelaria Prezesa Rady Ministrów
• Journal: Przegląd Legislacyjny
• Year: 2016
• Issue: PL 4(98)
• Pages: 47-58

Contributors

author

Zeifert Mateusz

• (Uniwersytet Śląski - University of Silesia)