LANGUAGE OF LEGISLATIVE TEXTS AND NORMATIVE ASSESSMENT – BASED ON SELECTED ACTS Cover Image

Język tekstów legislacyjnych i jego ocena normatywna – na przykładzie wybranych aktów prawnych
LANGUAGE OF LEGISLATIVE TEXTS AND NORMATIVE ASSESSMENT – BASED ON SELECTED ACTS

Author(s): Katarzyna Sornat
Subject(s): Law, Constitution, Jurisprudence
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: linguistic-stylistic analysis;linguistic error;legal language;normative assessment;legal style;legislation;

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the results of a linguistic-stylistic analysis of selected three acts, posted on the official website of the Journal of the Polish Republic in November and December 2016. As pointed out by the author, in spite of the specific terminology and phraseology, legal language can not be considered as a separate code (which is, for example, the Polish ethnic language), because it has not developed its own grammar. Therefore, if the author speaks of the legal language, she means rather the legal style, understood as a variety of the special (functional) Polish general language, assessed from the perspective of the normative rules of a general language. The analysis has shown that the examined legislative texts contain primarily the syntax errors (57% of all errors), followed (in terms of the number of occurrences) by the errors regarding the other subsystems of language. In a total of 39 pages the author recorded 292 violations of the linguistic correctness. Despite revealing numerous imperfections of the studied writings, the results of the overall analysis proved them satisfactory. Negligible number of grammatical shortcomings, flawless spelling, small number of mistakes concerning the government and isolated cases of syntactic homonymy demonstrate good quality of the studied texts. However, the authors need to ensure greater accuracy in terms of formation, reduce the number of the troublesome participle clauses and multi-nominal constructions, use more suitable expression, and avoid the heavy style.

  • Issue Year: 2020
  • Issue No: 83
  • Page Range: 220-233
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Polish
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