Chapter Seven
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world around us. In the chart example above, no explanation is needed
about which checkboxes go with which decision. The spatial arrangement
automatically gives us the clue. The totality of the chart arrangement
works to provide such clues even to someone whose first language is
Chinese or Hebrew, i.e., reading left-to-right is a newly learned skill. The
choices for each decision must be the checkboxes on the right, not the ones
above or below, for the chart to make sense.
Avoid too many nouns
A common feature of legal writing is the use of several nouns that all
reference the same general concept, such as “alteration, amendment, or
redraft.” This had been common practice in legal writing (once again
borrowed from the need for prescriptive writing found in contracts) and is
consistent with the notion that this retelling covers all the bases. English is
not unusual in offering an array of words that represent essentially the
same concept. In the case of a court form, redundant nouns merely create
confusion. This practice, fortunately, has now fallen out of favor (Wydick
2005).
Of course, cognitive linguists recognize that different nouns representing
the same thing often have subtle differences in meaning, depending on
context. Indeed, the awareness of that fact is commonly cited as one of the
notions in support of a usage-based definition system, i.e., the realization
that words can have more encyclopedic intent than might be implied by
presuming a strict necessary-and-sufficient-condition-created set. When
the context of a situation, however, does not clarify which of the alternate
nouns might best fit, then plain language experts will sometimes employ a
clarifying parenthesis, e.g., “amendment (including alteration or redraft).”
With regard to my earlier remarks about hoping to get researchers
interested in law as a specialist language and in terminology in particular,
perhaps one particularly easy place to begin is the problem of
combinations of nouns and lawyers’ attempts to avoid problems of
context, indexicality, and even implicature. The legal literature has for
years dealt with this problem in various ways. Even with the Internet,
Thomson Reuters still publishes the standard legal reference work Words
and Phrases, which lists court interpretations of various words and
phrases.