The relevance of the language of legal documentation for the interpretation of the linguistic situations of the past has been highlighted by a long tradition of studies (just think, in the Romance linguistics domain, of the classic works of Sabatini [1965 and 1968] and Avalle [1970]). The study of the legal documentation of the past has proven to be key in understanding the interactions of the different linguistic levels in the development of different languages, as well as in analyzing language contact situations of the past.

In fact, the interactions between the formulaic aspects of the legal language (often linked to its official status) and the use of a less tradition-driven language when describing specific events or situations (think for instance of the domain of notarial documentation, but also of the discussion of specific actual situations in the legislative documentation) offer a privileged observation point on the linguistic and sociolinguistic dynamics taking place in the processes of linguistic variation and change. The linguistic analysis of the legal documentation is therefore a key element in the study of the variational architecture of linguistic systems in diachrony.

The language of these texts is interesting for the study of language Ausbau (“elaboration”, in the sense of Kloss [1967]) and of language standardization phenomena. Given their characteristics, legal documents and legal discourses clearly show both the traces of the past and those of the present. They also often show paths that have been followed and then, apparently, marginalized or abandoned, in a fundamental pendulum between pressions from above and from below.

From this perspective, non-literary legal documentation is also of great interest for the relationships between different levels of language (sociolinguistic variation, see Sornicola [2012], Greco [2018]), and for the identification of regional variations (diatopic variation). The study of the discourse traditions of the different text types (laws, notarial documents, writs, treatises, statutes…) is also a topic of significant interest for historical sociolinguistic studies and, more in general, for the analysis of language variation and change (see Kabatek [2005]). Finally, the language of non-literary, legal documents constitutes a precious tool for the study of the interactions and intersections of the different levels of language, with a series of conditions that challenge traditional categories and questions the validity of the categories and analytical tools of traditional (historical) sociolinguistics.

References

Avalle, D’A. S., 1970, Latino «circa romançum» e «rustica romana lingua». Testi del VII, VIII e IX secolo, Padova, Antenore.

Greco, P. (2018), “Linguistica e sociolinguistica nell’analisi delle carte notarili di Cava de’ Tirreni (IX secolo). Qualche considerazione metodologica”, in Greco, P. / Vecchia, C. / Sornicola, R. (ed.), Strutture e dinamismi della variazione e del cambiamento linguistico, Napoli, Giannini, pp. 169-180.

Kabatek, J. (2005), Die Bolognesische Renaissance und der Ausbau romanischer Sprachen, Tübingen, Niemeyer.

Kloss, H. 1967, “‘Abstand languages’ and ‘ausbau languages’”, Anthropological Linguistics, 9, pp. 29-41

Sabatini, F. (1965), “Esigenze di realismo e dislocazione morfologica in testi preromanzi”, Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale, 7: 972-998.

Sabatini, F. (1968), “Dalla ‘scripta latina rustica’ alle ‘scriptae’ romanze”, Studi Medievali, s. III, 9, pp. 320-358.

Sornicola, R. 2012, Bilinguismo e diglossia dei territori bizantini e longobardi del Mezzogiorno: le testimonianze dei documenti del IX e X secolo, Napoli, Giannini.

We invite submissions for Linguistic Meaning in Legal Interpretation, a new thematic area of the 2025 ILLA General Conference. This thematic area will be a forum for researchers interested in the complex relationship between linguistic meaning and the interpretation of statutes, contracts, constitutions, and other legal texts. This complexity, manifested in ‘hard cases’ of legal interpretation, is driven by linguistic indeterminacy: ambiguity, vagueness, and context dependence.

A central question of the thematic area is how legal constructs, such as ‘ordinary meaning’ or ‘original public meaning’, and legal interpretive frameworks, such as textualism, originalism and purposivism, are to be understood in view of these inherent properties of natural language. Our goal is to foster interdisciplinary dialogue that deepens our understanding of how linguistic theory and methods can inform legal analysis (and vice versa).

We welcome submissions that approach the notion of textual “meaning” from the standpoint of contemporary linguistics and philosophy of language and/or from a legal theory perspective. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Theory-driven studies of past or contemporary court disputes over legal interpretation;

• Experimental, corpus-based, or otherwise empirical studies on the interpretation of legal language;

• Linguistically-informed guidance on how to resolve hard cases of textual analysis, as supported by theoretical and/or empirical considerations;

• Critical engagement with theories and methods of interpretation from legal jurisprudence;

• Position papers on the integration of linguistic theory and methods into legal interpretation practices, including the limits of linguistic analysis in the legal arena.

The panel aims to bring together scholars exploring various facets of courtroom interaction, with a special focus on the asymmetrical discourse structure and constraints which affect witness narratives and the making of evidence. Our goal is to promote the most recent research into courtroom tactics, and to relate these practices to larger societal issues surrounding legal practice. We encourage those interested to submit papers which explain how attorneys manoeuvre different semiotic resources to exercise power and maintain control over witness testimony and/or reveal what resources witnesses bring to bear to resist such attempts despite the power imbalance. Various research perspectives are welcome, including discourse analysis, pragmatics, text linguistics, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis and social semiotics.

In this thematic area, focus will be on communication on law in different media, especially in the field of dissemination / instruction and popularization, with an interest in multimodal interaction between the verbal and other modes (or without recourse to the verbal mode).

This means that the communicative objects of study spans from forms of edutainment (like documentaries and true crime shows and podcasts) over didactic material at different educational levels (primary, secondary, and tertiary school systems) to types of communication underlying citizen-science projects in the field of law. However, more discipline-internal communicative objects like statutes, ordinances, and argumentative texts from a court context may also be interesting for this thematic area.

The central characteristic for contributions is that the study interest should be in the interaction between at least two modes. In the thematic area, we take a broad view on multimodality, focusing upon the idea of multimodal studies as studies of the social-semiotic construction of meaning through the interaction between different modes, e.g., between written and spoken word, between spoken words and gestures, between spoken words and visual illustrations, or between written words and visual elements, to name a few examples.

The power of language should not be underestimated. Social prejudice, discrimination and violence are perpetuated through language. This thematic area welcomes papers analysing the significant impact of language in the age of misinformation from both legal and linguistic perspectives. Contributions that analyse the linguistic and legal challenges faced by analysts and jurists in fine-tuning existing linguistic theories or current regulations to the analysis of empirical data from new social phenomena endorsing social prejudice, discrimination or violence will be particularly valued.

This panel on multilingualism in law and legal institutions invites contributions which deal with the specific complexities of law, which arise when legal communication is conducted across different languages in national, international and European legal settings. Potential issues include:

• Legal translation in EU institutions and translation into the national legal languages
• Legal interpretation of EU law at the Court of Justice of the European Union and in national courts
• Translation at the European Court of Human Rights
• Translation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights
• Interaction across languages in the court room
• Language policy in multilingual states and international legal institutions
• Language rights and language skills in law
• Protection of minority languages in Europe

Timothy Endicott once wrote: “Political philosophers are not preoccupied with questions in the philosophy of language. But legal philosophers are political philosophers with a specializations that gives language (and philosophy of language ) a special importance”.  Existence of the strong links between the philosophy of language and other areas of linguistic research on the one hand and the philosophy of law on the other is an obvious matter. Law has the important linguistic dimension. Therefore, certain fundamental questions of the philosophy of law, both ontological and epistemic, relate to the role of the language in law.

As far as ontological questions are concerned, let us list as examples the following. Is law an artifact constituted by linguistic behavior of members of a society? What is the role of language in creation and persistence of law?  Must any law find its expression in linguistic utterances? If law is primarily, but not exclusively a linguistic phenomenon, what are the relations between its linguistic dimension oh the one hand and psychological, sociological, and axiological dimensions on the other?  

Even more obvious are the link between epistemic questions of the philosophy of law and various areas of linguistic enquiry, including at the first place the philosophy of language. One of the basic topics of the philosophy of law is legal interpretation. It is to be stressed that it is not the case that each inquiry into legal interpretation must be par excellence philosophical. Theories of legal interpretation are artifacts produced in specific socio-cultural circumstances and are usually designed to help officials and lawyers to effectively structure legal reasoning. But anyhow any such theory must at least implicitly adopt certain philosophical assumptions relating to the philosophy of language. The role of the philosophy of law is inter alia  to reveal and reconstruct such assumptions in order to make sure that the theory of interpretation in question has solid and consistent philosophical background. If legal theorists engage in interpretative debates without recognizing their philosophical grounding, they are not able to charitably read and criticize opposing views.

A lot of more detailed topics can be listed here: the problem of vagueness and open texture in law, the problem of normative nature of the language of law, semantic and pragmatic aspects of legal meaning, the role of evaluative language and so on. Those topics are par excellence philosophical, but they have also a practical significance.  

The above is obviously not a complete list of topics included in the general area “Philosophy of law”. We invite papers relating to any matter under the general heading “Philosophy and Law”, provided that they have relevance for any type of linguistic inquiry into law.

One of the main reasons for the growing interest in legal argumentation is related to the changing views on judicial tasks within the context of the rule of law (Kloosterhuis 2013). In modern legal systems, judges not only apply legal rules but also resolve interpretation issues and justify their decisions. In doing so, they have recourse to various types of interpretative arguments. For example, in the logical approach, legal argumentation is examined as a form of reasoning based on premises leading to a certain conclusion. The rhetorical approach focuses on the material (rather than on the formal) aspect of argumentation, which is then evaluated based on its effectiveness for the audience or audiences to which it is addressed. Rooted in the dialogical tradition (e.g. Alexy 1989; Peczenik 1989), the pragma-dialectic approach views judicial argumentation as part of a critical discussion in which a legal standpoint is defended against anticipated or actual antagonistic reactions (e.g. Feteris 2017). More recently attempts have been made to   integrate research methods from linguistics with contemporary legal argumentation theory (e.g. Mazzi 2022; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2024). In addition, multi-modal argumentation with its logical, emotional, visceral and kisceral arguments is an important addition to logical argumentation, especially when real-life situations are considered. It does not discard logic but adds other modes of argumentation to complement it, to emphasize the realistic environments of communication (Novak 2024).

This panel on approaches to legal argumentation and interpretation invites contributions in the broad area of legal argumentation and interpretation. Potential issues that are expected to be resolved include:

• How to integrate various approaches to legal argumentation?
• How can the interpretation of a legal rule be justified in an acceptable manner?
• What is the relationship between legal rules, legal principles and general moral norms and values?
• How to reconstruct real life argumentation in judicial decisions?
• What is the role of informal logic in legal argumentation?
• What is the role of value-laden language in the construction of argument?
• How to use generative AI models to analyse legal argumentation?

Call for Papers: Extremist Narratives and Cybercrime

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for our upcoming thematic block focusing on the intersection of extremist narratives and cybercrime. This initiative aims to explore the intricate relationship between extremist narratives and various forms of online criminal activity. We invite scholars and practitioners from diverse fields to contribute their insights and research findings, from a linguistic, legal, jurilinguistic point of view.

Understanding Extremist Narratives

In this context, we define “extremist narratives” as:

• Extremist: Narratives that sharply delineate a (morally and ethically) superior in-group from an out-group deemed inferior and dangerous. These narratives justify hostile actions to defend in-group interests, dismissing alternative perspectives.
• Narratives: These stories utilize “storytelling” techniques, presenting a structured sequence of events involving clear Us/Them dichotomies. Such narratives emotionally anchor and reinforce specific worldviews while propagating and normalizing ideologies.

Research Questions and Themes

We seek to address the following key questions:

• What are the challenges in characterizing extremist narratives both as independent phenomena and as forms of cybercrime?
• How do the linguistic characteristics of extremist narratives correlate with different types of cybercrime?
• What legal frameworks and responses are effective in addressing these issues?

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions on a variety of topics, including but not limited to:

• Freedom of Speech versus Censorship Culture.
• Hate on the Internet and Trolling.
• Hate Speech.
• Apology of Terrorism.
• Incitement to Violence.
• Conspiracy Theories: Fake News and Cryptomarkets.
• Issues of Authorship and the Use of Bots.

Many crucial issues of today–including war, peace, freedom, and state repression–pressure the law and challenge its aspirational claims of being apolitical. Examining the language used to maintain the posture, and perhaps facade, of being apolitical can illuminate how state power is exercised and disguised through the seeming neutrality of the law. This thematic area welcomes papers from linguists as well as from lawyers.