A linguistic Insight into Legislative Drafting. Tradition and Change in the UK Legislation

Abstract

The main assumption proposed in this book is that legislative drafting represents an example of professional discourse, where the propositions of specialized information is translated into meanings, and such meanings are given as input to the rules and strategies of grammatical formulation. A relevant question for our understanding of modern legislative process is related to the effects of ‘context’ at different levels, within which legislative process takes place. By looking at those levels, the analysis conducted in the book demonstrates that it becomes possible to reach a deeper understanding of the professional groups taking part in the process, better assess the lexico-grammatical and textual features of its final product (i.e., normative texts), and suggest alternative linguistic and textual strategies aimed at making texts more accessible to potential readers and/or intended users.