The Legal Discourse Analysis: Resolving Syntactic Ambiguities in the Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act 1973
Keywords:
legal discourse, syntactic ambiguity, tree diagram, discourse analysis, law, prepositionsAbstract
Legal language is complicated for a common man to comprehend. This study aims to resolve syntactic ambiguities in the legal act named Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act 1973. The present study is qualitative, and the Discourse Analysis Methodology was applied to this research by using the Tree Diagram Structure. Syntactic categories are also known as parts of speech. They are the group of words for instance, nouns, noun phrases, verbs, verb phrases, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, prepositional phrases, conjunctions, and determiners which identify the rules and restrictions to make a sentence. The result showed that 10 sentences and 2 phrases were ambiguous due to the disarrangement of prepositional phrases in the Act and it caused more than one interpretation. After using the tree diagram and arranging the words it became easy to understand the legal sentences in the Act. To conclude, legal sentences and phrases are full of prepositions. Prepositional phrases are a fundamental part of the legal discourse and legal language has its specialized language which needs to be taught with the help of linguistics. When law and linguistics are combined it will make way for an interdisciplinary approach and it will create scope and further areas to be explored in the field of law.
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