Linguistic Aspects of Legislative Expression

In this work, Frederick Bowers applies modern linguistic theory to an analysis of legislative expression as found in contemporary statutes in Canada and other jurisdictions in the British tradition, including the United States. This is the first book-length study to describe statutory language in a formal, explicit, and comprehensive way. Its theme is that legislative language is not a separate, private language, as many critics argue, but a particular application of language in general.

Bowers examines several aspects of statutory expression, including the purpose of an act, the semantic structure of words in relation to their use and to the canons of statutory construction, the syntactic structure of sentences in relation to precision and clarity, and the style of expression in relation to ordinary language. His descriptive methods integrate the terms of standard transformational and structural grammar along with the current linguistic theories of M.A.K. Halliday, John Searle, and C.F. Fillmore.

The analysis is based on expression taken from recent Canadian Federal and Provincial Acts. But equally important as statutory data are analyses of the observations on the expression of such data made by courts and commentators on statutory drafting. Chief among these are the treatises of E.A. Driedger and Reed Dickerson, whose manuals are the most influential on current statutory drafting in North America.

Bowers concludes that the function of legislative language is that of all practical language -- to convey intended meaning in a form that is expressive of it and as accessible to the reader as the complexity of substance permits. Legislative language neither uses nor needs the kind of obscure language for which it is frequently blamed. Moreover, he points out, statutory language is unlikely to become as plain as many laypersons would prefer; it is no different from the expression used in conveying any complex matter. Statutory language can explicitly be shown to share all the characteristics of general language, and its draftsmen and interpreters to demonstrate the linguistic intuitions which are general to all language users.

Frederick Bowers is an associate professor in the English department at the University of British Columbia.