Conversational Implicatures and Legal Texts

GVU Journal of Humanities , 2025

This study examines the role of implicature in Nigerian legal texts, focusing on contracts, wills and testaments, and courtroom interactions. Using a qualitative discourse analysis approach, the study explores how strategic ambiguity and manipulative language influence legal interpretation and power dynamics. Drawing on Grice's Cooperative Principles, the analysis highlights frequent violations of the maxims of Quantity, Manner, and Relation to create legal uncertainty, maintain power imbalances, and shape judicial outcomes. Findings reveal that vague contractual terms, ambiguous testamentary clauses, and suggestive courtroom language often disadvantage weaker parties by allowing dominant entities such as corporations, legal professionals, and the judiciary to exercise interpretative control. The study recommends enhancing precision in legal drafting, enforcing stricter judicial interpretation, promoting public legal awareness, encouraging plain-language reforms, and strengthening ethical guidelines for legal practitioners. These measures would help mitigate exploitative ambiguity while maintaining the necessary flexibility of legal language. Ultimately, the study underscores that language in law is not neutral but a tool for both justice and manipulation, necessitating increased transparency and fairness in legal discourse.

Conventional Implicature in English Legal/ Diplomatic Texts: International Conventions, 2009

Diplomacy is the negotiation between International affairs, which takes diplomatic language as its carrier. Diplomacy is to deal with the affairs among different countries. However, different from the ordinary language, diplomatic language has its unique characteristics as a tactful and polite language. This work looks at a widely held conception that legal/ diplomatic language is always being pulled in different directions. Its statements have to be so phrased that we can see their general applicability, yet be specific enough to apply to individual circumstances. Governmental declarations, Parliamentary debates, treaties, conventions, news reports, and scientific articles are all genres of discourse and forms of interaction and communication and most of their knowledge is presupposed in discourse, and hence not asserted and even not expressed but left implicit, such as legal/ diplomatic discourse. Diplomatic discourse leaves many things unsaid; as in diplomatic discourse, frequent use is made of "implicature", in order to suggest information not explicitly expressed in the text. These inferences are usually based on particular beliefs, opinions and knowledge of some concrete situation. One of the most important properties in discourse is what is not said, but remains implicit, as in the case for implicature. Above all, legal/ diplomatic texts have to be expressed in such a way that people can be certain above the intention of diplomatic documents. One of the main functions of legal/ diplomatic texts is to manipulate diplomatic thought and ideas. This seems a particularly significant case of using language to mean more than is said. Legal/ diplomatic language depends on implications diplomatic texts will be considered from a pragmatic perspective by focusing centrally on implicature, which is an additional conveyed meaning that something must be more than just what the words mean. Keywords: Diplomatic discourse, implicature.

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2011

I will suggest, in this article, a possible explanation of the fact that legal language appears incoherent to the general public. I will present one legal text (an indictment), explaining why it appears incoherent to legal laypersons. I will argue that the traits making this particular text appear incoherent are, first, that a specialized legal meaning is conveyed implicitly and, second, that there are no keywords that could direct laypersons to the knowledge making this meaning obvious to legalists. I will conclude that any legal text having these traits is likely to appear incoherent to the general public and suggest that the traits making my example appear incoherent might be rather common among the various texts of the various legal systems. On this suggestion there is no need to assume any causal relation between lawyers' social interests and the apparent incoherence of legal language as it entails that this incoherence is inevitable. (I will argue that it is a result of the facts that legal language is ordinary language used, in the ordinary way, in the special context of the legal discourse.)

Social Science Research Network, 2009

The content of the law is often determined by what legal authorities communicate. Both lawyers and philosophers of language know very well, however, that the full content of communication in a natural language often goes beyond the meaning of the words and sentences uttered by the speaker. Semantics and syntax are essential vehicles for conveying communicative content, but the content conveyed on particular occasions of speech is often pragmatically enriched by various factors. The standard model in the pragmatics literature, however, focuses on ordinary conversations, in which the parties are presumed to engage in a cooperative exchange of information. The legal context offers an example of conversation that is strategic in nature. Part of my purpose here is to show that the pragmatics of strategic conversation has certain features that deviate from the standard model.

In this paper I outline a comprehensive theory of legal interpretation based on an assumption that legal text, understood as the aggregate of texts of all legal acts in force at a particular time and place, describes one rational and coherent possible world. The picture of this possible world is decoded from the text by interpreters and serves as a holistic model to which the real world is adjusted when the law is applied. From the above premise I will limit myself to drawing two conclusions for how legal interpretation should be carried out. First, I argue that the possible world described by the legal text has to be ‘accessible’ from the real world, i.e. it has to be feasible to transform the actual world into the described one. Were it otherwise, the possible world could not serve as a model for adjustment. The accessibility requirement imposes obligations on the interpreters to secure the rationality of the possible world decoded from the text, amongst other to secure that the description of this world is not contradictory and – as a consequence – the law of excluded middle is obeyed in the possible world described by the legal text. Secondly, I argue for the inevitability of interpretative discretion arising from the requirement to decode a sufficiently ‘saturated’ picture of the possible world., i.e. possessing enough properties to resemble the actual world. As texts have a limited number of sentences and worlds have an unlimited number of properties, interpreters have to supplement the picture of a possible world to achieve its coherence. This involves the inclusion of some additional, non-predetermined features that integrate with the properties of the world predefined by the legal text. This process of saturation consists of filling in so-called ‘places of indeterminacy’ (Roman Ingarden) with content implicated by other features of the possible world. I also argue that the discretion resulting from the necessity of filling in the places of indeterminacy is justified by the requirement of fulfilling the intention of the lawmaker to make the possible world described by the legal text real. The theory presented here is based on contemporary theories of discourse representation and so-called ‘text-world theory’ by J. Gavins. Phenomenalism and causal (historical) theories of reference provide its philosophical background. IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD THE PAPER, PLEASE USE THE LINK TO THE PAPERS.SSRN.COM PAGE (PROVIDED ABOVE).

Insights and Feedback Greatly Appreciated! This paper advances a novel hybrid theory addressing a fundamental puzzle in legal philosophy: how legal statements can simultaneously have both cognitive and practical features. Drawing on contemporary developments in metaethics and philosophy of language, we argue that legal statements express both beliefs and desire-like attitudes. My analysis yields three key findings. First, I demonstrate that within any given legal system, the descriptive content of legal statements remains invariant across different contexts of use and assessment – a feature that explains persistent patterns of legal disagreement, retraction and attribution of responsibility for content. Second, I show that the desire-like states expressed by legal statements are uniformly directed at the general property picked out by “It is the law that…” rather than at particular legal norms, regardless of the speaker – thereby preserving their inference-licensing property and evidential function. Third, I identify generalized conversational implicature as the mechanism through which legal statements convey desire-like states explaining their distinctive pragmatic features. This theoretical framework offers a novel solution to the puzzle of legal motivation: rather than positing a necessary conceptual link between legal judgment and motivation, it explains their characteristic connection through the general action-guiding purpose of legal discourse and Gricean conversational principles.

This paper aims to investigate the applicability of Grice's theory of conversational implicatures to legal statutes and other general heteronomous legal acts (while acts of private autonomy are excluded from the scope of the present investigation). After a brief presentation of Grice's theory Sect. 1 and an attempt to adapt conversational maxims to normative discourse – which is assumed to be neither true nor false Sect. 2 – I will survey one of the most convincing arguments against the applicability of conversational maxims to the legal domain, the one based on the (absence of a precise, real) legislative intention Sect. 3. I will argue that this argument is not decisive, but that, however, conversational maxims do not apply to legislation: as a matter of fact, legal practice does not include Grice's conversational maxims among its conventions Sect. 4. This inapplicability, which derives from the very nature of the cooperative principles and the maxims, fi ts other peculiarities of legal practice: perhaps the most relevant is what we may call the contex-tual indeterminacy of legal discourse, a characteristic that is rigidly coupled to its confl icting nature. I will claim that all these features explain why legislation and other general heteronomous legal acts are not special cases of ordinary conversations Sect. 5 .

International journal of legal discourse, 2017

Legal interpretation often includes a profusion of meta-pragmatic comments about the interpretation process itself. Thus, while pragmatic theories refer to the interpretation processes as natural, mostly unconscious processes, in legal interpretation the inference processes take on a conscious form. Meta-pragmatic comments provide a glimpse into this process and surface various aspects of it that have been described theoretically. The aim of this study is to examine the possibility of applying theoretical pragmatic terms to the legal interpretation discourse.A semantic-pragmatic analysis of a few cases shows that while the linguistic component of the legal interpretation makes it easy to apply pragmatic theory, some of the procedures performed by judges are incompatible with a semantic-pragmatic interpretation and contradict its theoretical assumptions. The purposive approach to interpretation that has developed in the Israeli legal system raises some serious problems in that sense. Applying the objective purpose of a statute even when it is obvious that the legislators could not have desired that in order to change the law cannot be considered "interpretation" in the pragmatic sense, since the central element of speaker's intentions has been given a completely different meaning, and the aim of the interpretation procedure, namely identifying the speaker's intentions, has for the most part been lost. This paper suggests that these cases should be viewed as exceptions to pragmatic interpretation and they do not permit application of pragmatic theory to them, at least not of the types of approaches attributed to Grice's legacy. Nevertheless, this does not mean that theoretical pragmatic tools are not applicable to judicial opinions and to other kinds of legal text.

Ratio Juris, 2008

The purpose of this essay is to explore some of the main pragmatic aspects of communication within the legal context. It will be argued that in some crucial respects, the pragmatics of legal language is unique, involving considerations that are not typically present in ordinary conversational contexts. In particular, certain normative considerations that are typically settled in a regular conversational context are unresolved and potentially contentious in the legal case. On the other hand, the essay also argues that a careful distinction between various pragmatic aspects of language use enables us to offer some generalizations about types of pragmatic enrichment that could be taken to form, or not to form, part of what is actually determined by legal expressions.

Ius Humani. Law Journal

This paper presents the role of some intrinsic sources in legal interpretation. Some of linguistic aids follow from provisions of the law and other from the commonly accepted ruling practice or views expressed in literature. The position of those aids was verified through the analysis of case-law, literature, and provisions of law. The first section and second section focus on the priority of plain meaning rule and intrinsic sources in legal interpretation which is strongly emphasized in legal literature, case-law and the interpretative provisions of many countries. Next, it presents how certain linguistic tools work in case law practice, what problems they can cause and what problems they can solve. The third point addresses the use of dictionaries as tools of linguistic interpretation. The fourth section explores the role of selected interpretative canons often found in legal regulations and case law practice: ordinary meaning canon, gender/number canon, ejusdem generis canon, pre...