Forensic Linguistic Features of Judgement Texts

Abstract

The present paper deals with the analysis of judgement texts. The common people often find legal language strange as it is different from day-to-day language. Legal language is a distinct variety due to features like use of technical terms, foreign words, repetition and impersonal style. The paper deals with forensic linguistic analysis of six judgement copies in civil cases. This analysis is focused on the use of morphology, adverb and adverbials, syntactic complexity, complex sentences, complex prepositions, binomial expressions, legal archaism, archaic Latin-French terms, negative words and religious expressions in the collected data. The use of common terms and simple sentences can be encouraged to make judgement copies more comprehensible and easy to understand. At the same time redundancy and legal archaism can be avoided. These changes will make legal texts easy to understand for common people.