Conference announcement
Dec 31, 2012
Convenors: Janet Giltrow (University of British Columbia, Vancouver) and Dieter Stein (University of Düsseldorf)
Date: July 30 – August 1, 2013
Location: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
One page abstracts to be submitted to
by February 10, 2013.
The Pragmatic Turn: Interpretation and inference in legal discourse.
Regarded as a “special language” distinguishable from “ordinary language,” legal language has traditionally been examined in terms of its wordings and linguistic forms, or in terms of the content and concepts specific to it, these subject to further inquiry for intercultural difference.
However, recent study of legal language has turned from surface and substance to pragmatic terms. By means of pragmatics, rhetoric, discourse analysis and conversational analysis, these lines of inquiry have shown that legal language shares with every use of language default inferencing – and distinguishes itself from other uses in further types of and constraints on inferencing that are specific to legal discourse. Traditional canons of interpretation already point to types of inferencing that are part of the “grammatical methods.” In other words, interpretation is a specific type of inferencing.
The issues to be discussed at this meeting are important for any linguistic explanation of principles of legal interpretation and for any principled treatment of what it means for a constructed meaning to be “in the text”—an issue central for the textualism issue in legal theory.
The conference will address following four types of issues:
- to what extent are default inferences current in ordinary language treated differently in legal discourse, oral and written? Can standard implicatures be treated as being “in the text”? Which types of implicatures can and have been treated by interpretative processes as being “in the text”? What is the legal practice in this regard, and how can it be made explicit by linguistic analysis?
- if inference implies accessing language-external information, has legal practice evolved rules as to which types of external knowledge are to be accessed and which ones not? Are there differences and developments from historical and intercultural perspectives?
- what does the pragmatic turn in the analysis of legal discourse imply for any notion of “literal” interpretation?
- on the basis of the analysis of these questions, to what extent is it possible to define legal genres by their characteristic types of inferences, in contradistinction to genres from other domains and in methodological contradistinction from definitions by linguistic surface forms?