Abstract
Lay readers often experience problems with the peculiarities of legal language, as manifested in legal texts, such as acts of parliament or contracts. The aim of this article is to identify the syntactic properties of Afrikaans legal language that cause processing problems for lay readers of legal texts. To date precious few studies have been conducted on Afrikaans legal language and the linguistic constructions that are typically employed in Afrikaans legal texts. This study thus represents an attempt to make a contribution to the field of forensic linguistics – the interface where language and the law meet. Forensic linguistics is an area that is not robustly researched in South Africa.
The definition of “plain language” in two important South African protectionist acts require the drafters of consumer documents to pay attention to sentence construction in order to render these documents easier to understand and to provide access to vulnerable consumers. Drafters of legal texts in contemporary South Africa should attempt to avoid problematic syntactic constructions, not only in English but also in Afrikaans, to give effect to the plain language provisions of the National Credit Act (NCA) of 2005 and the Consumer Protection Act (CPA) of 2008. Section 64 and section 22 both specifically mention sentence construction: "the vocabulary, usage and sentence structureof the notice". If sentence structure is considered to be a potential source of comprehension difficulty, vulnerable consumers are afforded the opportunity to understand the content of important legal texts that may have a profound effect on their daily lives if such texts are rewritten in so-called plain language with deliberate attention to sentence structure.
This study investigates whether the same problematic sentence constructions that are typically employed in Afrikaans statutes also appear in Afrikaans consumer documents. Following Šarčević (1997:11), Tiersma (1999:139–41) en Cao (2007:8), legal texts can be divided into different types which are read by heterogeneous target audiences. This creates a particular tension between language use that is appropriate when communicating with lay audiences and language use that is suitable in communication with expert audiences. Gibbons (2003:174, 198) refers to this tension as the "two-audience dilemma". It is argued in this article that whereas statutes are read and used mostly by people who are trained in law, consumer documents are intended for ordinary citizens who are not legal experts, although both acts and consumer documents belong to the type “operative text”. These are texts that constitute the law.
For the purpose of identifying the complex syntactic constructions in Afrikaans legal language that may cause problems for lay readers of consumer documents and result in their not understanding these documents without undue effort, ten acts of parliament dating from between 1979 and 1988 were used as a corpus. However, as the NCA and CPA apply to consumer documents and not to acts of parliament, nine consumer documents were also included in the corpus to render the corpus representative of operative legal texts. Problematic syntactic constructions in statutes and in consumer documents were identified and examples of these are discussed in this article.
Against the backdrop of consumer protection in contemporary South Africa it is critically important that consumer documents should be readily understood by lay readers. For this reason, suggestions are made in this article as to how poor syntactic constructions in consumer documents can be improved to reduce the cognitive processing burden experienced by lay readers. It is shown that the same complex syntactic constructions that are found in statutes also occur in consumer documents. These are: long and complex sentences; insertion of conditions, qualifications and provisos; syntactic discontinuity; lengthy initial case descriptions; nominalisations; omission of relative pronouns; negative constructions; passive constructions; and prepositional chains.
The occurrence of these syntactic constructions in consumer documents is highly problematic as consumer documents, unlike statutes, are subject to and must comply with the provisions of the NCA and CPA. It is of the utmost importance that the drafters and compilers of consumer documents, such as the terms and conditions of a loan agreement, or the safety instructions for use of a product, be aware of – and avoid – the syntactic constructions that increase the processing load of lay readers and cause comprehension problems.
The contribution of this study lies in (1) the identification of problematic sentence constructions in Afrikaans statutes and consumer documents; and (2) the practical demonstrations of how problematic constructions in specifically consumer documents can be improved to aid lay readers, thereby providing guidance to the drafters of these types of legal texts.
Keywords: comprehensibility; comprehension problems; lay readers; plain language; readability; sentence construction
Lees die volledige artikel in Afrikaans: Sinskonstruksies kenmerkend van Afrikaanse regstaal.
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