WRITING SAMPLE

SYNTATIC ANALYSIS IN THE LEGAL LANGUAGE: A CASE STUDY OF SOME

SELECTED NIGERIAN COURT JUDGEMENTS

BY

ALUKO WEMIMO ADEFUNKE

 INTRODUCTION

Background to the Study

Communication in human social organizations has remained central to successful and effective
interactions. Language choice and style of presentation constitute the most important resource
available in any social context for any meaningful social interaction. Language is a form of
communication. Humans live and work in groups that require sound communication, sharing
information, broadcasting warnings, forming and maintaining relationships (Yule, 2010). Chomsky
(1957) sees language as a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of
a finite set of elements. He implies that each sentence has a structure. Human brain is competent
enough to generate a limitless number of utterances from limited set of rules of a particular language.
Human brain is so productive that a child can at any time produce a sentencethat has never been said or
heard before.

According to Owen (2006: p.1), language is a socially shared combinations of symbols and rules in
which the combination of rules governs the combination of symbols. He also asserted that it is a
socially acceptable code or conventional systems for delivering concept through the use of symbols
and the combination of desired symbols are governed by the provisions.

Kersaf (2005: p.1), as stated in his work, provides two basic understanding of language. The first
understanding of language is a means of communication between members of the public in the form of
a system of the sound produced by them. Secondly, language is a communication system that uses
symbols vocal speech sound which is arbitrary. Language is important in every
aspect of our lives because it allows people to communicate in ways that enables sharing of common
ideas. And most important function of language is to communicate properly.

Language can be used in different context, which it is language as being spoken and language as being
written. One could state that there are two main uses of language: one is to inform; the other is to
deceive. We use language in many different ways and for many different purposes. We write and we
speak. We work with language, play with language, and earn our living with language. We court and
seduce, buy and sell, insult and praise, all by means of language. A helpful scheme for analyzing the
uses of language involves five broad categories: the informative, the evocative, the expressive, the
evaluative, and the performative (J. L. Austin, 1962).

The study of language is often divided into semantics, pragmatics and syntactic in which syntactic is
the central point to this study. The word “syntax” comes originally from ancient Greek syntaxis and
literally means a putting together” or arrangement. Syntax is the collection of rules

that govern how words are assembled into meaningful sentences. While these are useful distinctions in
the study of language, language use in the real world. Syntax links names and actions as a imitation of
the order of events in the real world. Syntax has developed differently in different languages.
Increasing complexity of sentences accommodates an increasing need for more detailed
communications. Syntax is the form of language that admits any content. The content may be literal or
fact. The content may be an invention, a fictional story that gains creditsby being inserted into proper
syntax. Humans are confused or alarmed by improper syntax, but will often accept forge contents with
little resistance or with demonstrable appreciation.

In linguistic, Syntactic pattern is the syntactical analysis and sentence structure of a language by rule of
syntax which includes the English rank scale such as sentence structure, clauseand phrase etc. Syntactic
pattern represents the language specific grammatical features and how these features are represented in
a particular language. The syntactic pattern to be presented here is in dependency of how a legal
language is represented and differs from other language which reflects in its syntactical sentence
analysis structure. However, the syntactic pattern is formal enough to code the linguistic information
correctly and to allow for conversion to some formalism.This work will look at syntax from the way the
language of court judgments is structured in someof the Nigerian Courts but not from the point of view
of what structures is permissible and which is not in the language of the lawyers. As Huddleston (1986)
has pointed out, within the sentence we have a much sharper distinction between permissible and
impermissible combinations, which enable us to formulate rules distinguishing what is grammatical
from what is not.

Law, just like every other discipline, has its own peculiar language, which may seem not really known
to the majority of the masses. The peculiarity of a legal proceeding or document is not a recent
phenomenon. In fact, it has been a long-established tradition. Perhaps, an observer caninfer and safely,
too, conclude that a legal document is not meant for an ordinary audience but forthe “initiated,” which
are, by their professional training, coupled with the responsibility of encoding and decoding the legal
document. The age of big data has not only found its way to the study of language and to the study of
law, but it has also found its way to the interdisciplinary fieldof legal linguistics. The use of linguistic
corpora in legal analysis is growing, both in the determination of individual cases and in the study of
language use that reveals regularities that arenot part of the “official” canon of legal doctrine (Vogel,
Hamann & Gauer, 2017). The law is one of the most important social institutions. Its chief function is
to regulate social behavior in an optimally rational and reasonable manner in a given community. But
at the same time it is an institution which depends on language and whose operations therefore also
have a linguistic dimension. In view of the importance of law in society, it is no surprise that scholars
in many disciplines have taken an interest in legal language, trying to discover its characteristics
through the methodologies of their own special fields (Nvkyu, 2010).

All legal systems develop certain linguistic features that differ from those of ordinary language.
Sometimes these practices differ only slightly, especially when a legal system is primarily oral or
relatively young. At the other extreme, lawyers and judges may develop language that is entirely
different from ordinary speech. Most modern legal regimes fall between these extremes. Typically, the
legal profession uses language that contains a substantial amount of technical vocabulary and a number
of distinct (often archaic) features. As a result, the speech, and to a greater extent, the texts produced by
such legal systems may be difficult for the lay public to understand, even though they are spoken or
written in a variety of ordinary language. It is clear that legal language is a sublanguage rather than a
language distinct from ordinary English. Moreover, emphasis is laid thatthis sublanguage is not unitary,
but rather is diverse and fluid in response to different cultural contexts, as revealed by the particular
uses of legal English in India. Nevertheless, the sublanguage of legal discourse diverges from ordinary
English in "far more" ways "than the technical languagesof most other professions. (Tiersma, 2010).

In a general term, a legal language is a formalized language based on logic rules which differs from the
ordinary natural language in vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as other linguistic
features, aimed to achieve consistency, validity, completeness and soundness, while keeping the
benefits of a human-like language such as intuitive execution, complete meaning and open upgrade
(Wydick, 2005). There are different kinds (genres) of legal writing: for example, (a) academic legal
writing as in law journals, (b) juridical legal writing as in court judgments, and (c) legislative legal
writing as in laws, regulations, contracts, and treaties (Bhatia 1993). Another variety is the language
used by lawyers to communicate with clients requiring a more "reader-friendly" style of written
communication than that used with law professionals (Goddard, 2010).

Legal language is coded in language, and the processes of the law are mediated through language. The
language of the law is therefore of genuine importance, particularly for people concerned with
addressing language issues and problems in the real world - that is, Applied Linguists. In addition,the
study of legal language used in a courtroom interaction before judgmentdeals with the ways how legal
meanings are produced and interpreted during the trial (Stygall, 1994; Mooney, 2014). It is also about
the ways in which the power relations in the court are realized and negotiated through the language use
(Olsson, 2004). As an example, courtroom exchanges are observed to look at the primary speaking roles
of parties in the court such as judges,prosecutors, lawyers, etc. According to Danet (1980), the law has
two primary functions in society: ‘the ordering of human relations and the restoration of social order
when it breaks down’. The firstfunction concerns itself with the formulation and codification of rules
that govern human social behavior. In other words, it is the written letter of the law that tells us what is
acceptable or unacceptable as we relate with others.

This research work therefore explores the synthetic pattern of using legal language in the Nigerian
court judgments as language is the tool for conveying information using the two main divisions of law
which is the criminal law and the civil law. The technical, written, and power laden nature of legal
language makes the language of the law notoriously impenetrable for
nonlawyers. The situation is even worse for those who have a low proficiency in the language of the
legal process (Gibbons, 1999). The paper seeks to find out the different syntactic pattern used in some
selected court judgments in Nigeria and to show if the pattern in a judgment is similar to the pattern in
another judgment with regards to syntax.

Statement of the Problem

If there is a sector that demands the attention of every human being, it is the legal sector.Everybody is
involved directly or indirectly in matters pertaining to human rights and obligations. Every individual
desire that his rights be respected. But this becomes unattainablewhen the person has no full knowledge of
his rights.
The critical role of language in the courtroom has attracted and propelled many linguists to investigate
the nature of legal language in general. Legal documents are not written to intimidate the non-
professionals, but to enlighten everybody on the issues relating to their rights andobligations. Also, a
lot of studies has been done on legal language and court room judgements in which most of these
studies are from the developed countries and it has also been observed that previous works are mostly
on court room interactions which view of such studies addressed are not seen in Nigeria. Some of the
relevant studies on the nature of the language of law include discourse of lawyers and clients (Maley et
al, 1995; Haley, 1997). Discourse of trial Lawyers

(Stygall, 1994), Discourse of courtroom questions (Hale, 1999; Berk-Seligson, 1999; Ridgney, 1999;
Farinde, 2008), Language of Jury instructions (Levi, 1993; Jackson, 1995; Tiersma 1995); Dumas, (2000)
and others. Many researchers interested in forensic linguistics have also investigated the language of
courts reflecting, generally, the complexity of legal language and what makes legal language sound
Greek to the non-law professions and cause it to be incomprehensiblebut none has really ventured into
syntactically analyzing the pattern of legal language used in the judgments issued by courts of
competent jurisdictions. Thus, since scholars have not been able to find the syntactic problem in
Nigeria court judgement, the problem of this study is to find out the different syntactic pattern used in
some selected court judgments in Nigeria and how the legal language pattern in a judgment is similar to
the pattern in another judgment with regards to syntax

Aim and Objectives

The aim of this study is to closely examine the language of court judgements in Nigeria with the view
to identifying the inherent syntactic analysis and determining the peculiarity of such syntacticanalysis to
the genre of court judgement in a kind of logico semantic relation type of legal language.

The achievement of this research aim will require the pursuit of the following objectives which areto;

 Analyze the language of court judgement in terms of sentence structure in relation to logico
semantic relation of clause complex
 Examine whether the patterns observe in each judgement are similar (or not) to the normal
 sentence patterns;
 Find out what factors are responsible for the variation in syntactic patterns;

Research Questions
The following research questions were developed to guide the study.
 What are structural/syntactic patterns in relation to court judgment?
 Are there similarities and variations of syntactic patterns in different court judgments using Halliday’s
SFG approach?

Justification of the Study

The fact that several studies exist on legal language does not deny the fact that only few studies have
focused on the language of court judgments. The few studies in this field have mostly studied foreign
court judgments and not the Nigerian court judgments. Also, the existing studies have applied only
discourse analysis and semantics. Consequently, linguists have not been able to investigate the study of
syntactic patterns in the language of court judgment especially in Nigeria to understand the inherent
peculiarities.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the assumption that the legal language is different fromthe
general English language use by people. A study of this type is necessary to be able to provideuseful
insight into the use of English in specific contents and with focus on court judgments, a type of legal
language. A study of this type will be useful in the teaching of English for specific purposesespecially as
it will provide information on prevalent language use patterns in the legal profession.

This work will therefore be of great help to upcoming researchers who will like to make research on
something similar to this and those that want to explore more on this not only on legal languagebut also
language use in other profession.

Scope of Study

It is essential to limit the research scope and problem in order to avoid misunderstanding in interpreting
the findings. This study is limited to “the syntactic patterns in the legal language usedby some selected
Honorable Justices of the Nigerian High Courts in their written judgments”. Although, the language of
law, its words, syntactic structure and concepts are closely related to the legal system, these documents
were selected largely due to the fact that they are characterizedby linguistic aberration. For the purpose
of this study, the type of court judgement here will also be limited to the two main divisions of law; the
criminal and civil law. A civil case of the national industrial court of Nigeria in the Akure judicial
division before the lordship, Hon justice A.A Adewemimo, 16th October, 2019. Another civil case of
the high court of justice in the Ejigbo judicial division holden at Ile Ife, before the lordship, Hon justice
J.O. Ogunleye, 19th September,2019 and federal high court Abuja before the lordship, Hon justice Osho
Adebiyi.

Also, the criminal case in the federal high court capital territory before the lordship, Hon Justice

U.P Kekemeke, 6th February, 2020. Federal high court capital territory before his lordship, Hon justice
H.B Yusuf and Hon. Justice Abubakar Idris Kutigi. The analysis to be carried out in this study is a
linguistic analysis and not a legal or philosophical one. Also, the study analyses only the leading
judgments of 30 selected court pronouncements from the document.

The Concept of Syntax

Matthew (1982: p.1), says the term syntax is from the ancient Greek syntaxis. meaning“arrangement”
or “setting out together”. it refers to the branch of grammar which deals with theway words, with or
without the appropriate inflections, are arranged to show connections of meaning without the
sentence. According to Hana (2011), Syntax is a part of linguistics that has to do with the study of
sentence structure. It is based on three elements of a sentence: word order, word agreement, and
hierarchical structure of a sentence. If one wants some books and knows that they are called books, a
sentence may be constructed as “Want these I book.” It is not grammatically correct, and the listener
may not understand the message. The words should be arranged as, “I want these books.” one
should also ensure that there is word agreement in asentence; subject and verb, determiner and noun,
and other words have to agree with one anotherOnions (1971), opines that the term “syntax” means “to
arrange together” Also, Radford(1997), adds that syntax is the study of how words are combined
together to form phrases and sentences. It means that syntactic patterns and systems of rules and
categories underlay the theoryof sentence formations.
Furthermore, word order is very important in English, because the language is no longer inflected. That
is, individual words do not have endings to show which parts of speech they represent. Syntax is a tool
used in writing proper grammatical sentences.
(Burgess 1968), also assert that term ‘Syntax’ is used to mean the study of the syntactic propertiesof a
language. It is syntax that gives the words the power to relate to each other in a sequence to carry
meaning.

Relationship between Syntax and Grammar

According to Johnson (2020), grammar and syntax are closely related concepts, both in written and
spoken language. The terms are often used interchangeably and each concept has its own meaning.
Syntax is the arrangement of words and phrases in a sentence and grammar consists of the rules that
govern the composition of language. So, the relationship between grammar and syntax is similar to that
of parent and child, with grammar providing the structural rules that syntax and other concepts must
follow.
The relationship between grammar and syntax could be explained as the art of language, meaning
grammar, and how it is arranged, and meaning syntax. Although the term grammar was present in
ancient Latin and Greek cultures, the understanding of grammar as a set of rules pertaining to syntax
did not begin until the 16th century. Earlier before the 16th century, grammaris applied to learning in
general, with syntax covering any type of order or arrangement. So, syntaxand grammar are understood
to mean the rules governing proper sentence structure. For example, the references of a person and
themselves, an English phrase such as me and him might be used. But syntactically, I and he is an
acceptable order of words. It makes sense, whether ordered as me and him or him and me. Rules of
English grammar dictate that such phrase should be worded as him and me, so that both pronouns are
objective, with the personal pronoun me ordered last.

Theoretical framework

The study will make use of Halliday’s (2004) Systemic Functional Grammar to explain syntactic pattern of
Nigerian court judgements. This theory was first developed by Michael K. Halliday, an emeritus professor
of linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia in 1987. This theory revolves around the works of
J.R Firth and M.A.K Halliday particularly. The name‘systemic’ according to Halliday (2003), is not the
same thing as ‘systematic’, the term is used because the fundamental concept in the grammar is that of the
system. A system is a set of options with an entry condition; that is to say, a set of things of which one
must be chosen, together with a statement of the conditions under which the choice is available. What
distinguishes systemic theory is that its basic form of synoptic representation is not syntagmatic but
paradigmatic; the organizing concept is not structure but system (hence the name). Also, the grammar is
based on the notion of choice. The speaker of a language, like a person engaging in any kind of culturally
determined behavior, can be regarded as carrying out, simultaneously and successively, a numberof distinct
choices. It is the system that formalizes the notion of choice in language.

Conclusion
Syntax is a part of linguistic that has to do with sentence structure, grammar and syntax are closely
related concept with grammar providing the structural rule syntax which provide proper sentence
structure. Systemic functional grammar is under grammar and syntax. Out of so many approachesunder
grammar, systemic functional grammar theory was adopted in this study focusing on the three meta
functions of SFG which ideational meta function was adopted in this research.

In conclusion, the aim of the study to investigate the syntactic analysis of the (legallanguage, a case
study of Nigerian court judgements) was achieved through the adoption of

Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar approach in the ideational meta function as the theoretical
framework for viewing syntax and grammar in clauses complex and simplex throughlogico semantic
relation and system.

The research proceeded on the assumption that the understanding of legal language and its analysis of
the syntactic pattern is crucial to the interpretation of some court judgments and pronouncements. This
is because the analysis contains many clause complexes which makes it easier and clearer to
understand.
SFG theoretical framework states that there are three modes of meaning and these modes of meaning
fall under the metafunction of language. The term metafunction is used to avoid the mixup of function
with metafunction. He identifies the metafunctions of language as ideational, interpersonal and textual.
The ideational metafunction is the function for construing human experience. It is the means by
which we make sense of "reality" Halliday divides the ideational into the logical and the experiential
metafunctions. Halliday (1994), Eggins (2004), assert that theclause complex and simplex comes under
logical metafunctions which belongs to the broader ideational metafunctions. It refers to the
relationship that exist between clauses in a sentence and these relations are of two types, Taxis and
logico semantics. Taxis is divided into two components,parataxis and hypotaxis and the logico semantic
is divided into projection and expansion.

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