Assuming that legal science, specifically with regard to interpretation, has to provide the tools to reduce the uncertainty of legal solutions arising from the use of natural languages by legal orders, it becomes a central matter to identify, in this limited domain, the spectrum of semantic variation (and its boundaries) that language brings to the definition of a norm expressed by a norm sentence. It is in this framework that the present paper, analyzing norm sentences as a specific kind of speech act, examines the relation of the legal order to natural language rules, the limits of linguistic uncertainty, and alternatives of meaning as distinct possibilities of norms covered by the text (that are, because of this, still within what literal meaning is). Considering interpretation just as the linguistic decoding process, the reverse of the process of creating norm sentences, the paper also argues that subjects not connected with the relation between norm sentences and norms (mainly, normative defeasibility) are analytically distinct and should be removed from the field of language.1 On other forms of expressing norms (not considered here), for instance, Guastini 1996, 364ff.; Ross 1958, 91ff. Regarding the underlying concept of norm (a general deontic content), after all not distinct from, MacCormick 2005, 24; or Guastini 1999, 92ff.

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With an analysis of the structure and the sequence of analogy, the paper is mainly a cri� tique to the partial reducibility thesis: a thesis sustaining that analogy, besides a strictly analogical step, is in the remaining part reducible to balancing. hus, the paper points out some problems raised by the partial reducibility thesis, such as the contingency of reducibility or the fact that a proper analogy is done under the cover of a balancing. he main point is, however, the claim that analogy and balancing have opposite normative conditions, being this premise the reason to a structural explanation for the unaccept� ability of the reducibility enterprise.

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