Linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of simplification of English-language legal texts
DOI :
https://doi.org/10.33910/2686-830X-2025-7-4-205-217Mots-clés :
legal English, simplification of text, text complexity, cognitive barriers, legal discourse, democratization of languageRésumé
The present study is devoted to the urgent problem of overcoming textual complexity and cognitive barriers in the perception of legal English by non-specialists. In the context of the global democratization of language, caused, among other things, by globalization and the digital transformation of the legal field, there is an increasing need to simplify English-language legal texts, which are characterized by terminological abundance, syntactic complexity and a high degree of abstraction, which makes it difficult for non-specialists to understand legal norms. The aim of the work is to develop and substantiate linguistic and cognitive mechanisms for simplifying legal texts, which will simultaneously increase their accessibility to a wide audience and preserve the accuracy of the legal content. Achieving this goal requires analyzing existing approaches to simplifying legal texts in English, identifying the main linguistic and cognitive complexity factors of an English-language legal text, and developing technologies for lexico-semantic and morphosyntactic simplification, taking into account the mechanisms of cognitive perception characteristic of the language of law. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the complex application of linguistic and cognitive strategies to simplify legal texts in English. The practical part of the paper presents an analysis of a fragment of a legal text and its transformation using the developed technologies and cognitive strategies — frame analysis, conceptual categorization, as a result of which the author demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results obtained can find practical application in improving methods of teaching legal English and further developing mechanisms for simplifying professional texts.
Références
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