Contributions of the philosophy of science to juridical semantics

Discipline differences in the use of some expressions of certainty and positive affect

As part of a study of discipline differences in the expression of author presence in a 112 000-word corpus of 30 research articles – 6 from each of Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Medicine, Mineralogy, Physics – this paper examines discipline differences in the frequency, distribution by article section, and special meaning or function of the certainty adjectives 'clear' and 'obvious' and the positive affect adjectives 'significant', 'important', and 'interesting' (together with their corresponding nouns and adverbs). Chemical Engineering and Physics have the highest total frequencies and Medicine the lowest. In Introductions, the rate per 1000 words for Physics is about 8 times that for Medicine, but in Results the rates for these two disciplines are very similar, while that for Chemical Engineering is about 6 times higher. In Discussions, where the overall rate is highest, the rates for the various disciplines are very similar. The paper also suggests that in the case of the terms examined here, author presence is probably a variable which depends on the degree of subjectivity of the meaning of the term and the particular syntactic structure in which the term appears (anticipatory it, sentence adverbial, predicate adjective, adjunct adverbial, or attributive adjective).

Rogers, Margaret

Terms: A multifunctional view

Terms have traditionally been defined as the linguistic representation of a concept. This view is one in which terms are treated as a kind of label. It has been a major concern of terminology – both theoretical and practical – to describe and in certain cases regulate the relationship between these labels and their designated concepts using methods which aim to be ‘systematic’. However, there is increasing recognition that this view, which has its origins in the practical goals of standardisation and in the theoretical approach of onomasiology, needs to be supplemented by a greater awareness of terms as components of texts, ie as part of language use. The emphasis in terminology studies has indeed begun to shift away from a view of language use as a poor reflection of the language system towards a closer descriptive account of the behaviour of terms in text. The outcomes of such analyses are in turn helping to improve our understanding of a number of terminological issues, including term formation, term variation, crosslinguistic equivalence, multidimensionality, patterns of inflectional morphology, and so on. In this paper, the role of key terms in an emerging domain will be investigated from the point of view of their contribution to the patterns of lexical cohesion in both German and English texts. Implications for the form of terms, term variation and equivalence will be considered.

Roszkowski, M.A. Stanislaw
Towards the macrostructure of a prototypical contract. The analysis of formulaic expressions in English-language contracts

Closer examination of contracts reveals that this text type is characterised by a high occurrence of formulaic expressions, that is certain regular expressions which typically appear in certain places in the body of the texts and fulfil clearly designated functions. Those functions correspond to the places in the text where they appear.

It is possible, on the basis of a corpus of English-language contracts, to distinguish ‘units of organisation’ or components of contracts and thus to construct the macrostructure of a prototypical contract. Each such unit or component is inextricably bound up with such conventional, set expressions.
In my presentation I intend to propose the macrostructure of a prototypical contract. The word ‘prototypical’ is used in the sense of all potential components which might occur in a given contract since in some contracts certain components might not be necessary e.g. ‘preamble’ appears only in very formal and solemn contracts of considerable length. I discuss the role each such component plays in the text of a given contract. Then I move to identify and present a range possible formulaic expressions accompanying each component. They are arranged according to their size, their varying degree of formality and frequency of occurrence. Clear guidelines as to their usage will be provided reflecting GB and US variations.
The implications for translation are discussed since formulaic expressions pose serious problems and present many pitfalls for the legal translator.
All the examples come from a corpus of English-language contracts which has been compiled as part of a project of building large language corpora prepared by Lancaster University and the University of Lodz.

Ruohomäki, Katariina

Professional comments on news stories

For a journalist, writing is a profession. For example, a news journalist is an expert in writing news stories. The structure of a news story is strictly defined, and the language requires speacial attention. There are also many professional conventions that characterize the news language. One could say that a news journalist has to aqcuire an LSP in order to write proper news texts. Most people know how to read news stories, but only a professional knows how to write them.

This paper explores the structural and linguistic norms of news stories from the journalists point of view. Two journalists are given news texts to comment on, to analyze, and to criticize. The interviewees are also asked to bring a text of their own to the interview, so that they can explain the linguistic choises they have made when writing the story. The interviews are taped, transcribed, and analysed in order to find out which features in the news stories gain the journalist's attention, and what kind of comments they make on different components of the new stories. In this way some descriptive features of the LSP of a news story writer can be revealed.


Räisänen, PhD. Christine