Gramatyka przepisu jako przesłanka decyzji interpretacyjnej
The grammar of a regulation as a premise of an interpretation-related decision

Author(s): Mateusz Zeifert
Subject(s): Law, Constitution, Jurisprudence, Philosophy of Law, Sociology of Law
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: law interpretation; cognitive linguistics; grammar; syntax;legislative technique;
Summary/Abstract: The work is devoted to the grammatical plane of the language of the legal acts and the role which it performs in the process of the interpretation of law. The first part of the book contains an introduction to linguistics for lawyers – a brief description of three great trends of 20th-century linguistics, i.e. structural linguistics, transformation-generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, as well as a discussion of their influence upon jurisprudence. Then there is a description of the peculiar nature of the language of legal acts in the grammatical layer. The second part presents examples of grammatical problems which appear in adjudication, such as: the syntactic structure of a sentence, conjunctions, punctuation, declension categories and conjugation categories. The analysis employed almost two hundred rulings of Polish courts, as well as the Polish- and English-language subject literature. The third part constitutes conclusions drawn from research: a description of the argumentation which refers to the grammar of a regulation, interpretation- and editing-related guidelines, and an analysis of the problems under discussion from the perspective of a linguistic theory known as cognitive grammar. The merit of the work consists in three principal features. Firstly, it engages a problem which heretofore was underexplored in the (Polish and international) literature. Secondly, it skilfully utilises the output of linguistics, and in particular, cognitive linguistics – which heretofore was not tackled in jurisprudence. Thirdly, it was based on large-scale research of the body of rulings of the Polish courts, which also imparts a practical significance to it.

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