Communicative function and linguistic variation in state statutory law

Wood, Margaret (2023) Communicative function and linguistic variation in state statutory law. Doctoral thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

Statutory law has the power to create, modify, and terminate legal rights and obligations of everyday individuals. Even so, statutory language remains understudied from an empirical, linguistic perspective, in particular, in relation to the different ways in which statutory provisions modify and prescribe human behaviors. As the interpretation of statutory language is a critical part of the judicial process in the United States, the aim of this study is to provide a detailed linguistic description of statutory language, focusing on patterns of variation between texts serving different communicative functions (e.g., prohibition of actions, authorization of actions). In order to explore this variation, a framework of functional types of statutory provisions was developed in order to classify statutory texts into groups based on the function that they serve. This framework consists of seven functional types of provisions: Duties, Permissions, Impersonal Rules, Operational Definitions, Prohibitions, Procedural Guidelines and Criminal Offenses. One thousand statutes were sampled from the Arizona State Code, and each subsection of those statutes (i.e., A., B., C.) was classified by the communicative function it served in accordance with the framework. This resulted in a corpus of 2,972 statutory texts organized into seven sub-corpora representing distinct functional types of statutory provisions. The first analysis in the study was non-linguistic, focusing on the description of the relationship between functional types of statutory provisions and ‘titles’ in the Arizona State Code (broad areas of subject matter; e.g., Environment, Public Health, Education). Following this, keyword and key feature analyses were conducted in order to examine the extent to which functional types of statutory provisions exhibit systematic patterns of lexical and lexico-grammatical variation. Results from the linguistic analyses indicate that state statutory law is a linguistically varied register, and that some functional types of statutory provisions are more linguistically distinct than others. Criminal Offenses appear to be the most lexico-grammatically distinct, with 11 positive key features and 26 negative key features, many with large effect sizes (measured through Cohen’s d). This is in contrast to other functional types, such as Impersonal Rules and Prohibitions, each of which have 2-3 key features with small effect sizes. Operational Definitions and Procedural Guidelines are the most lexically distinct functional types, each with over 100 keywords. This is in contrast to the other five functional types of statutory provisions, each of which have fewer than 30 keywords. In addition to this, key features indicate that there is a divide between functional types of statutory provisions that function for description and identification (e.g., Operational Definitions and Impersonal Rules), and those that concern the regulation of human actions (e.g., Duties and Permissions). Overall, this study demonstrates that there is considerable linguistic variation within the register of state statutory law that can be attributed to the function of the statutory provision. This suggests that those who interpret the law would benefit from considering the influence of communicative function in statutes.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	corpus linguistics; legal interpretation; lexico-grammatical analysis; register variation; statutory law
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PE English
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Arts and Letters > English
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2025 21:52
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2025 21:52
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/6233

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