Linguistics and Language Practice

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Browsing Linguistics and Language Practice by Author "Carney, Terrence Robert"

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    Twis om woorde: ʼn forensiese ondersoek na semantiese kwessies in hofsake
    (University of the Free State, 2015-06) Carney, Terrence Robert; Bergh, Luna
    English: Law is dependent on language. This is seen, amongst others, in a court of law’s responsibility to interpret the meaning of words. Cases regularly revolve around words; as a result courts have to deal with lexical semantic issues. They do this by referring to a word’s definition in the relevant act, or they cite previous (mostly reported) cases that have dealt with the same words or situations. Sometimes a court will call on a linguist to give his/her expert opinion regarding tricky linguistic issues or terminology or a presiding officer will refer to a scholarly publication. However, when neither of these approaches shed any light nor seem necessary, a court has to interpret words according to their ordinary meaning. For this they often use dictionaries. Apparently a presiding officer never makes use of any other linguistic means to determine the contextual meaning of a so-called ordinary word. Dictionaries tend to be unreliable. By no means do they contain all the words in a language, their definitions are not always clear and they seldom define words in context. Apart from this, dictionaries get outdated quickly and they are dissimilar in their definitions. This study has found that presiding officers in South Africa make use of outdated dictionaries, they sometimes use bilingual dictionaries to define words and the majority of dictionaries used by them are compiled and published outside of South Africa. Using foreign dictionaries to give meaning to words used in South African contexts leads to obvious misinterpretation. It was also found that some South African presiding officers use dictionaries with limited scope, such as pocket and compact dictionaries. All of this creates the impression that law practitioners generally do not know that dictionaries have different goals and target audiences. Because dictionaries should rather be used as a starting point when dealing with the meaning of words in court cases, I suggest law practitioners approach meaning conceptually. Drawing on the work of Rosch, Fillmore and Barsalou, this study advocates the solving of lexical semantic problems by using frames, more specifically Barsalou’s frame model (1992). Due to the fact that speakers understand and process meaning by connecting language to experience and general knowledge, and by categorising information into groups that contain exemplars considered to be the best example of that category; it makes sense for a court of law to give meaning to words in the same way. Speakers deal with information in the form of concepts and those concepts are interconnected and form vast networks of meaning. Words are the lexical representations of those interconnected networks of meaning. Defining a word outside of its conceptual web implies that an interpreter thinks words mean the same in every context, and this is not true. If courts follow a conceptual approach, they will come much closer to a word’s actual, contextual meaning than what they find in a dictionary. The study comprises the following: Chapter 2 provides an overview of both international and local activities of forensic linguistics and positions the study within this field of research. Chapter 3 discusses the different means by which South African courts deal with meaning and the interpretation of words. This includes the theories of interpretation, the Interpretation Act and the use of dictionaries. Chapter 4 focuses on the field of semantics. The different aspects of semantics are discussed, leading to the cognitive linguistic view of prototypes and frames. The chapter ends with an introduction and explanation of Barsalou’s model and the six steps needed to interpret ordinary words found in cases. In Chapter 5 the model is illustrated and tested on words found in 20 South African court cases. In Chapter 6 the conclusion is drawn that the model shows the necessary potential to interpret ordinary words alongside dictionaries.