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Individual Conceptual Structure and Legal Experts’ Efficient Communication

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International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The article investigates characteristics of legal concepts as found in academic articles, focusing upon the knowledge base of legal experts. It is a cognitively oriented study of one of the semiotic basics of communication for academic legal purposes. The purpose is to study the structure of knowledge elements connected to the concept of “Criminal liability of corporations” from US law in and across individual experts in order to look for individual differences and similarities. The central concern is to investigate the conditions for the observable efficiency of semiosis in academic discourse. In a first basic section I discuss aspects relevant for a cognitively oriented study of academic discourse. The empirical part of the article consists of an analysis of text passages from two articles in American law journals. The results of the study support the assumption that high efficiency and precision of semiosis is due rather to the use of specific cognitive processing skills than to total identity of cognitive structures across individual experts.

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Notes

  1. Roelcke [35, pp. 17–26] talks about approaches focusing upon the influential factors as subscribing to the context model of pragmalinguistics. Studies of this kind typically come from the fields of genre or discourse analysis.

  2. An interesting case of focusing on the communication of the group, but with interest in developments, is the work on detecting new terms and concepts in corpora by looking for words with a specifically high ‘weirdness factor’ [20].

  3. Roelcke [35, pp. 17–26] sees such terminological approaches as adhering to the inventory model of system linguistics.

  4. Concerning the assumption that mental representations do not primarily have representational character, but are always functionally related to situation-based goals of the holder of the representations cf. [22, p. 204, [24, pp. 94–96, 39, p. 234].

  5. For more arguments in favour of memory as a (re-)constructive process, see [34].

  6. Candlin [6, pp. 24–28] states that this means that specialised discourse is characterised by alterity rather than by intersubjectivity.

  7. As a reaction to similar insights in the field of terminology a number of new approaches to terminological description have emerged. See Temmerman [43] as a very substantiated example of a new approach. [43, pp. 22–34] also has an overview over other critical approaches.

  8. Concerning the distinction, see [33, p. 526].

  9. Sowa [40] calls this type of semantic networks assertion oriented networks.

  10. For a deeper discussion of the methodology, see [10].

  11. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for these suggestions.

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Acknowledgments

The studies underlying this article have been partly undertaken during my visit as a research fellow at Brooklyn Law School, New York in February and March 2007. This visit was made possible by a grant from the Danish foundation Carlsbergfondet. I want to thank Prof. Larry Solan and Rachel Ehrhardt for invaluable help with these studies.

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  1. Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus, Fuglesangs Allé 4, 8210, Aarhus V, Denmark

    Jan Engberg

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Engberg, J. Individual Conceptual Structure and Legal Experts’ Efficient Communication. Int J Semiot Law 22, 223–243 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-009-9104-x

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