The language of truth and reconciliation: was it fair to all concerned?

Abstract

Words count in law and legal language exerts a considerable influence because it is through language that the intentions of the law giver are made clear, judgments are pronounced and social behaviour is regulated. Using a corpus of over 455 000 words of the legal discourse recorded and transcribed during selected Amnesty Hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, this paper reports on analyses of the overall characteristics of selected lexical items during the hearings. In order to provide a benchmark for comparison with so-called ‘natural' spoken discourse, the frequency of occurrence of these words is compared with the occurrence of the same words in the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English (Holmes 1995; 1996). It is argued that overall the vocabulary of legal English differs very significantly from that of everyday language patterns in ways that are very likely to impede comprehension and give a particular advantage to those who use it.


(S/ern Af Linguistics & Applied Language Stud: 2003 21(1&2): 1-14)