Panel proposal: Pragmatics in the law

Janet Giltrow & Dieter Stein

 

When legal scholars hear the term “pragmatics”, very likely two issues come to their mind: pragmatism in legal theory, and, at best, speech acts: especially, the high-end performatives which Austin found at hand in courts and in legally sanctioned ceremonies. The first concern is internal to legal theory and at best raises the issue what legal theory and linguistic pragmatics share, the second picks out just one aspect of linguistic pragmatics and uses it to explicate an aspect of legal theory.

Current work in both pragmatics and in law suggests that there are many more areas where “meaning making” in the law can be illuminated by a broadly-conceived concept of pragmatics beyond, but including, speech act theory and its account of indirect speech acts. Even as there are many traditions of legal interpretation – not only ‘canons of construction’ but also other practical principles such as noscitur a sociis, for example – which share principles with linguistic pragmatics, pragmatics has so far made few contributions to the toolkit of legal scholars. And even as common ground in these traditional areas of interpretation go undeveloped, further areas are waiting to be explored, across the range of legal genres, not only written but spoken and digital.

In developing these areas of common ground between legal and linguistic disciplines, this workshop also encourages scholars to engage in a contrastive view, given that not only legal systems and cultures differ, but also linguistic forms of their realizations.

Here are some suggestions for topic areas:

Inferencing in legal genres: specific forms of inferencing in legal discourse

The pragmatics of interpretation

Literalness vs inference in legal discourse

Pragmatic concepts in forensic Linguistics

Changing legal norms as changes as a discourse process

Discourse analysis of spoken legal genres

Pragmatic parameters in forensic linguistics

 

Please let each of us have page and a half abstract by December 31, 2017.

Notification about acceptance will be given in January 2018.

Following AMPRA customs, papers read must not be longer than 30 min and are subject to final approval by the AMPRA program committee.

 

 

 

 

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