Language complexity across sub-styles and genres in legal Russian
The purpose of the paper is to find out the differences in linguistic complexity between legal documents, opposed by domain, sub-style and genre. The authors explore the large and diverse corpus of Russian legal texts and compare (1) international documents and documents of national law, (2) documents of the three sub-styles (administrative, legislative and justiciary), and (3) texts of different genres within sub-styles. To obtain complexity scores, an automatic model is used whose modules are capable of predicting complexity either by using the fine-tuned ruBERT model, or by using 133 language metrics, or in a hybrid way. The paper analyzes a dataset consisting of 43,804 documents, 118,768,028 words. National law documents are classified into three sub-styles. In addition, each document is characterized according to the genre and to the issuing body. Thus, 68 genres were identified. All documents were assigned complexity scores ranging from “0” to “12”. The vast majority of all documents were scored as maximally complex. The hybrid model assigned a complexity level of “12” to 97.1% of administrative sub-style documents, 94.5% of legislative sub-style documents, and 99.7% of judicial sub-style documents of national law. For all international law documents, the proportion of documents with a level of complexity of “12” is 94.1%. The set of legislative sub-style texts is the most varied in complexity. On average, the most complex documents in the dataset are of justiciary sub-style ones. Linguistic features successfully contrast international and national documents, as well as legislative and justiciary sub-styles. When comparing documents by genre, the authors interpreted only the average values of the 22 syntactic metrics. In general, a comparison of the genre-based document groups showed that it is not the genre itself that may be decisive for the complexity score, but the issuing body.
Figures
Blinova, O. V. and Tarasov, N. A. (2023). Language complexity across sub-styles and genres in legal Russian, Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 9 (2), 73-96. DOI: 10.18413/2313-8912-2023-9-2-0-5
While nobody left any comments to this publication.
You can be first.
Bhatia, V. K. (1983). An applied discourse analysis of English legislative writing, University of Aston in Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. (In English)
Bhatia, V. K. (2013). Analysing Genre: Language use in Professional Settings, Applied linguistics and language study, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, UK. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315844992(In English)
Blinova, O. and Tarasov, N. (2022). A hybrid model of complexity estimation: Evidence from Russian legal texts, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2022.1008530(In English)
Borisov, A. B. (2010). Bol'shoj yuridichesky slovar' [Large legal dictionary], Knizhnyj mir, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Dell’Orletta, F., Venturi, G. and Montemagni, S. (2012). Genre-oriented Readability Assessment: a Case Study, Proceedings of the Workshop on Speech and Language Processing Tools in Education, The COLING 2012 Organizing Committee, Mumbai, India, 91–98. (In English)
Dmitrieva, A. V. (2017). “The art of legal writing”: A quantitative analysis of Russian Constitutional Court rulings, Sravnitel’noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, 118, 125–133. https://doi.org/10.21128/1812-7126-2017-3-125-133(In Russian)
Dodonov, V., Krylova, M., Panov, V., Palatkin, A., Trofimov, V. and Ermakov, V. (2001). Bol’shoj yuridichesky slovar [Large legal dictionary], Nauchno-izdatelsky tsentr INFRA-M, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Durant, A. and Leung, J. H. (2016). Legal Genres, in Language and Law: A Resource Book for Students, Routledge English Language Introductions, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, UK, 11–15. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315436258(In English)
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2007). Legal terms in context: phraseological variation across genres, in Evidence-Based LSP: Translation, Text and Terminology, Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication, Peter Lang AG, Bern, Germany, 455-470. (In English)
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2012). Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English: A Corpus-Based Study, Łódź Studies in Language, 22, Peter Lang Verlag, Berlin, Germany. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-00659-9(In English)
Howe, P. M. (1990). The problem of the problem question in English for academic legal purposes, English for Specific Purposes, 9, 215–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/0889-4906(90)90014-4(In English)
Iedema, R. A. M. (1993). Legal English: Subject Specific Literacy and Genre Theory, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 16, 86–122. (In English)
Knutov, A., Plaksin, S., Grigorieva, N., Sinyatullin, R., Chaplinsky, A. and Uspenskaya, A. (2020). Slozhnost rossiiskih zakonov. Opyt sintaksicheskogo analiza [Complexity of Russian Laws. The Experience of Syntactic Analysis], HSE University Publishing House, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Korobov, M. (2015). Morphological Analyzer and Generator for Russian and Ukrainian Languages, in Khachay, M. Yu., Konstantinova, N., Panchenko, A., Ignatov, D. and Labunets, V. G. (eds.), Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts. AIST 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, Springer International Publishing, 320–332. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1503.07283(In English)
Kozhina, M. N., Duskaeva, L. R. and Salimovsky, V. A. (2011). Stilistika russkogo yazyka [Stylistics of the Russian Language], Flinta, Nauka, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Kuchakov, R. and Saveliev, D. (2018). Slozhnost pravovyh aktov v Rossii. Leksicheskoe i sintaksicheskoe kachestvo tekstov: analiticheskaya zapiska [The complexity of legal acts in Russia: Lexical and syntactic quality of texts: analytic note], European University at Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Russia. (In Russian)
Kurzon, D. (1985). How Lawyers Tell their Tales: Narrative Aspects of a Lawyer’s Brief, Poetics, 14, 467–481. (In English)
Martínez, E., Mollica, F. and Gibson, E. (2022). Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language, Cognition, 224, 105070. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105070(In English)
Mattila, H. E. S. (2013). Comparative legal linguistics: language of law, Latin and modern lingua francas, 2nd ed., Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., Farnham, Surrey, UK. (In English)
Orts, M. Á. (2015). Power and Complexity in Legal Genres: Unveiling Insurance Policies and Arbitration Rules, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 28, 485–505. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9429-6(In English)
Saveliev, D. and Kuchakov, R. (2019). Resheniya arbitrazhnyh sudov subjektov Rossiiskoy Federatsii: leksicheskoe i sintaksicheskoe kachestvo tekstov: analiticheskaja zapiska [Decisions of arbitration courts of Russian Federation: lexical and syntactic quality of texts, analytic note], European University at Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Russia. (In Russian)
Saveliev, D. A. (2020). Issledovanie slozhnosti predlozheny, sostavlyayushchih teksty pravovyh aktov organov vlasti Rossiiskoy Federatsii [A study in complexity of sentences constituting Russian Federation legal acts], Pravo. Zhurnal Vysshey shkoly ekonomiki [Law. Journal of the Higher School of Economics], 1, 50-74. https://doi.org/10.17323/2072-8166.2020.1.50.74(In Russian)
Schwarzkopf, B. S. (1996). Ofitsialno-delovoy yazyk [Official business language], in Graudina, L. K. and Shiryaev, E. N. (eds.), Kultura russkoy rechi i effektivnost obshheniya [Culture of Russian speech and effectiveness of communication], Nauka, Moscow, Russia, 270–281. (In Russian)
Solganik, G. Ja. (2003). Stilistika teksta: Uchebnoe posobie [Text Stylistics: A tutorial], Flinta, Nauka, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Solnyshkina, M. I., Solovyev, V. D., Gafiyatova, E. V. and Martynova, E. V. (2022). Slozhnost teksta kak mezhdistsiplinarnaya problema [Text complexity as an interdisciplinary problem], Voprosy kognitivnoy lingvistiki [Issues in Cognitive Linguistics], 1, 18-39. https://doi.org/10.20916/1812-3228-2022-1-18-39(In Russian)
Straka, M. and Straková, J. (2019). Universal Dependencies 2.5 Models for UDPipe. URL: http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-3131 (Accessed 15 January 2023). (In English)
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. (In English)
Tessuto, G. (2012). Investigating English Legal Genres in Academic and Professional Contexts, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. (In English)
Tiersma, P. M. (1986). The Language of Offer and Acceptance: Speech Acts and the Question of Intent, California Law Review, 74, 189–232. https://doi.org/10.2307/3480357(In English)
Trosborg, A. (1991). An analysis of legal speech acts in English Contract Law. “It is hereby performed”, HERMES – Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 4, 65-90. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v4i6.21456(In English)
Trosborg, A. (1995). Statutes and contracts: An analysis of legal speech acts in the English language of the law, Journal of Pragmatics, 23, 31–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(94)00034-C(In English)
Venturi, G. (2012). Investigating legal language peculiarities across different types of Italian legal texts: an NLP-based approach, IALF Porto, 138-156. (In English)
Wang, W. (2019). Text analysis, in McKinley, J. and Heath, R. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, Routledge, London, UK, 453–463. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367824471(In English)
The research is supported by the Russian Science Foundation, Project #19-18-00525 “Understanding official Russian: The legal and linguistic issues”.