The Language of Law; Problems and Solutions A Case of Parliament and The Courts

Abstract

Legal language is delicate as well as complex which is under investigated in Kurdistan Region, representing a wide gap in the literature on legal discourse. Moreover, this topic is fundamental and has direct relationship to the populace's life. Any misunderstanding in the legal texts is likely to have direct impact on an individual's life and their freedom. Therefore, exploring the legal language, whereby the terms should be optimally accurate, is highly crucial. The issue is mainly related to the standard and formal language of the state which requires corporate compliance with strict grammatical rules and precise spelling. Adopting the qualitative method, the current paper makes an attempt to find the gaps observed in legal texts and propose solutions. The data were obtained from Kurdistan Parliament, Judiciary Council and the Courts documents. The study consists of two parts and conclusions. The first part which is mostly theoretical focuses on the language of writing, the jargon and the nontechnical language.  The second part starts with a brief historical background; then the legal jargon and its characteristics are discussed. At the level of orthography, the relationship between spelling and semantics, the terminologies, and the grammar and its significance in the area are analyzed. The researcher has made use of the Transformational Generative Grammar for the grammatical analysis. The paper ends with conclusions and a list of references.