Arabic Legal Language Analysis

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Malinkoff (1963) believes that the use of "formal words" is a distinctive feature of the language of the law. They are characterized by 18 being dignified, ceremonial, and polite expressions. The preference of "shall" over "will" is seen as a formal feature in "Law shall prevail". In legal drafting, non-standard terms are never used. Instead, highly formal words are usually employed. For instance, the word deem instead of consider, the word liable instead of responsible (Sqires & Rombaur 1982:103). Everyday English words that when used in law have different meanings from the everyday usage. For example, the familiar term consideration refers, in legal English, to contracts, and means, an act, forbearance or promise by one party to …show more content…

The following are most prominent lexical features of Arabic legal language: 1. Doublets: In Arabic, word pairs used as redundancies to serve emphasis are common as in: This establishment announces and declares) (ان هذة المؤسسة تعلن و تصرح 2. Binominals: Emery defines them as collocations of antonyms, synonyms or near-synonyms (Emery, 1989: 9). In Arabic legal texts, binomials are not necessarily more common than other Arabic registers. The motivation for using binominals in Modern Written Arabic is primarily stylistic. Emery's examples are عاجلا ام اجلا "sooner or later",الامن و السلام "peace and security", ذهابا و ايابا"round trip". 3. Descriptive epithets: such epithets are intended to lay emphasis on and further modify the noun. This example is due to Emery (1989: 10). The two high contracting parities confirm يوكد الطرفان الساميان المتعاقدان

Syntactic features of Arabic legal language are the following: 1. Nominalization: Arabic sentences can be classified into nominal sentences (verbless sentences) and verbal sentences (having verbs). Like written legal English, intensive use of long complicated nominals is a feature of legal Arabic. This example is due to (Emery, 1989: 8) ما يقرره المجلس بالاجماع يكون ملزما لجميع الدول. In this example, the nominal group is introduced by the relative "ما ". 2. Verbal group: Emery (1989:6) argues that the imperfect past verb is equivalent to "shall" in legal English and it may express condition or stipulation as

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