Understanding Legal and Administrative Texts
Legal and Administrative Texts: Characteristics and Structure
Specific Language
The language of law and administrative law exhibits distinct characteristics. We can differentiate between:
- Legislation: Originating from the legislative power residing in Parliament, which holds ultimate responsibility for laws.
- Judicial or Procedural Texts: Emanating from the judiciary, these texts resolve conflicts arising from violations of laws.
- Administrative Texts: Produced by the Administration, where the executive branch delegates the management of public services.
Citizens may also initiate legal and administrative texts when interacting with these areas, such as through appeals or petitions.
Administrative texts share similarities with legal texts, as they are derived from them. However, administrative texts are used by a broader segment of society and are, therefore, generally simpler in their presentation.
Text Types and Structure
The primary function of administrative and legal language is often conative, meaning it stems from an authority. Texts can be:
- Normative: Defining a concept or providing a means to an end.
- Prescriptive: Prohibiting, requiring, or permitting certain actions.
Narrative, descriptive, explanatory, and argumentative elements may also be present when it’s necessary to present facts, describe situations, provide explanations, or construct arguments. A key feature is the use of an external structure that adheres to a predetermined format. These structures provide established guidelines for interpreting the text. Many administrative texts now utilize forms, with typographical elements like layout, font size, numbers, and spacing contributing to these pre-established models.
Linguistic Form
Legal and administrative texts are based on natural language but require clarity, precision, formality, objectivity, and universality. The issuer has limited stylistic choices.
Morphosyntactic Level
Key features at the morphosyntactic level include:
- Nominal Style: Emphasizing concepts through:
- Nominalization (e.g., “courses” instead of “give course”).
- Use of Substantives (e.g., “the defendant,” “the taxpayer”).
- Omission of Articles.
- Long and Complex Sentences: Simple prepositions or conjunctions are often replaced by prepositional or conjunctive phrases (e.g., “in order to,” “according to”). However, particularly in forms, there’s a tendency towards concise style, linking and deleting items, and using clear syntactic patterns supported by the typographic layout. The slash (/) is commonly used.
- Specific Verb Usage: Abundant use of gerunds, participles, and infinitives. The impersonal voice is also prevalent, evident in numerous passive and impersonal constructions. Due to the prescriptive nature of these texts, there are many ways to express obligation: the periphrasis *required*; the future tense to indicate obligation and possibility; and imperative verbs (e.g., “fault,” “declare,” “promise”).
Formal address is used to express distance, as seen in the use of the official plural (“we hereby inform you,” “we let you know”) and the third person instead of the first.
Lexical Level
The vocabulary is primarily denotative, aiming for impartiality, and often reflects the influence of legal tradition. For this reason, it can sometimes be anachronistic. Technical terms, many of them abstract, are abundant. Archaisms, buzzwords, clichés, and courtesy formulas are also common. A contrasting trend to the use of archaisms is the adoption of acronyms. Legal texts tend to be more conventional, conservative, less prone to change, and employ more formal registers. The richness of technical terms is considerable.
Types of Texts
Administrative and legal texts are categorized based on their issuer:
- Legislation: Originating from an authority with legislative power, these texts are always normative or prescriptive.
- Legal Texts: Resulting from the work of the courts, either as a source or outcome of a legal process. These involve requesting the justice system to intervene in a conflict.
- Administrative Texts: Sent by the administration or by a citizen requesting a benefit or fulfilling a duty.