Legislative Drafting and Language: Legal Language in Context

Abstract

A word, when used in a piece of text, usually denotes only one meaning out of the multiple meanings it is inherently capable of bearing. The general observation is that it is the context that determines which meaning of the word should be considered. This observation, as a logical consequence, leads us to identify the context responsible for meaning variation of a word. The general view is that the identification of context depends heavily on intuitive abilities of a language user. One way to facilitate the achievement of the important goal of ensuring that legislation is interpreted as the drafter intended is clearly to make legislative drafters more aware of the linguistic aspects of their activity, so as to enable them to test more effectively the linguistic accuracy and the discoursal efficacy of the texts they are drafting.