Instruments and rules of production and interpretation of a concise text (with special regard to normativity)

Abstract

Abstract In the production of concise texts, several instruments are used, of which two can be considered as basic: intratextual referencing (anaphora/cataphora) and the simple or complex ellipsis (ellipsis/syllepsis). However, the use of these instruments affects the unambiguity and intelligibility of the text. Certain rules for and limits to the simplification and shortening of the primary text are needed to secure the possibility of an unambiguous reconstruction of the text by the language user. However, we show that the elimination of homonymy from these texts seems to require considerable skill in the given area. Some such texts may be unintelligible even to informed experts. We delineate some basic cases of application of instruments for the streamlining of texts, with paradigmatic examples from law, including its Anglophone variants. Partly due to the nature of modern English as used in law, Anglo-American linguistics was compelled to formulate, in cooperation with legal theorists, explicit rules for the production and reconstruction of concise texts. By contrast, neither Slovak, nor Czech linguistics offers a self-contained set of such explicit rules. Using examples from law, we therefore propose explicit formulations of several rules which are used implicitly. They are the rule of the last antecedent, the rule of serial antecedents, the rule of the nearest reasonable referent, the rule of the series qualifier, the rule of unchanged topic, the rule of focus development, and the rule of repetition dominance. We argue that in the reconstruction of certain concise legal texts, the syntactic and semantic rules provided by linguistics or logic do not suffice. Therefore, it is necessary to complement them with specific methods of interpretation of legal texts.