Grammaticality and Normative Grammar in Spanish-Language Legal Discourse

• Published in: Revista de llengua i dret Vol. 48; no. Dec; pp. 99 - 132
• Main Author: Calvo Ramos, Luciana
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: 01-12-2007
• ISSN: 0212-5056

The current linguistic concepts of grammaticality & acceptability are applied to an analysis of legal discourse in Spanish from the perspective of three conditioning factors: (1) the codes used, (2) the functions of legal discourse, & (3) the main goal of legal texts to legitimize power. Two layers of grammaticality are distinguished in Spanish legal texts: a layer stemming from political & parliamentary discourse & one representing an indirect reproduction of the first layer in the technical language variety of jurists & legislators. Both layers are shown to be circumscribed within structures & linguistic forms typical of the normative grammar of the Spanish Academy; whereas the political-parliamentary layer is redundant, bombastic, & inflexible with a limited repertoire of communication strategies, the technical layer that gives laws their final form maintains the enunciative structures of conative function with ritualized forms & outdated rhetorical codes. All parties concerned continue to be trained in programs of study that uphold puristic linguistic concepts & therefore prefer so-called grammatical correctness over linguistic & semantic acceptability, with the result that legal texts inadvertently tell the citizenry more than their formulators suppose. References. Adapted from the source document