The Phraseology of Legal French and Legal Popularisation in France and Canada: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis

Abstract

The popularisation of legal knowledge is a critical issue for equal access to law and justice. Legal discourse has been justly criticised for its obscure terminology and convoluted phrasing, which notably led to the Plain Language Movement in English-speaking countries. In Canada, the concept of Plain Language has been applied to French since the 1980s due to the official policy of bilingualism, while the concept has only been recently discussed in France. In this paper, we examine the impact of Plain Language rewriting on legal phraseology in French popularisation contexts. The first aim of our study is to see if plain texts published in France contain more traces of legal phraseology than French Canadian texts. Our second objective is to determine if a ‘phraseology of plain language’ can be identified across genres and languages. To do this, we compare two corpora of expert-to-expert legal texts written in French—made up, respectively, of legislative texts published in France and judicial texts published by the Supreme Court of Canada—with two corpora of texts that are claimed to have been written in Plain French Language for a non-expert readership—texts that guide laypersons through legal and administrative processes in France and summaries of decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada. Using n-grams, we extract and discuss the patterns that emerge from the corpora. In particular, our analyses rely on the concept of ‘lexico–grammatical patterns’, defined as the minimal unit of meaningful text made up of recurrent sequences of lexical and grammatical items. We then identify a sample of recurring lexico–grammatical patterns and their discursive functions.