The dissemination of legal knowledge is a critical issue for equal access to law and justice. Legal discourse has been justly criticized for its obscure terminology and convoluted phrasing, which has notably led to the Plain Language Movement in English-speaking countries. In Canada, the concept of Plain Language has been applied to French since the 1980s due to the official bilingualism policy, while the concept has only been recently discussed in France.
In this paper we examine the impact of plain language rewriting on legal phraseology in French dissemination contexts. The first aim of our study is to see if plain texts published in France contain more traces of legal phraseology than French Canadian texts, which have been implementing Plain Language guidelines for years. Our second objective is to determine if a 'phraseology of plain language' can be identified across genres and languages, and whether it is in accordance with plain language guidelines.
To do this, we compare and contrast two corpora of expert-to-expert legal texts written in French, made up respectively of legislative texts published in France (4M words) and judicial texts published by the Supreme Court of Canada (700 000 words), with their expert-to-non-expert counterparts, i.e. two corpora of texts that are claimed to be written in plain French language for a non-expert readership published online by legal institutions: texts that guide laypersons through legal and administrative processes in France (870 000 words) and summaries of decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada (70 000 words).
Using ngrams and textometric methods, we extract and discuss the patterns that emerge from the corpora. In particular, our analyses rely on the concept of 'lexico-grammatical pattern', defined as a more-or-less fixed, recurring sequence of lexical and grammatical items. For instance, the followingpassive sequence [Person] a été accusé de [crime/offense] is used to introduce a case and to topicalize human referents. We identify the recurring lexico-grammatical patterns and their discursive functions.
References:
ASPREY, Michèle M. Plain language around the world. Language: Introductory readings, 2010.
GLEDHILL, Christopher, PATIN, Stéphane, et ZIMINA, Maria. Lexico-grammaire et textométrie : identification et visualisation de schémas lexico-grammaticaux caractéristiques dans deux corpus juridiques comparables en français. Corpus, 2017, no 17.
GOŹDŹ-ROSZKOWSKI, Stanislaw et PONTRANDOLFO, Gianluca (ed.). Phraseology in legal and institutional settings: a corpus-based interdisciplinary perspective. Routledge, 2017.
TURNBULL, Judith. Communicating and recontextualizing legal advice online in English. Popularization and knowledge mediation in the legal field. LIT Verlag, Münster, 2018, p. 201-222.
