I will suggest, in this article, a possible explanation of the fact that legal language appears incoherent to the general public. I will present one legal text (an indictment), explaining why it appears incoherent to legal laypersons. I will argue that the traits making this particular text appear incoherent are, first, that a specialized legal meaning is conveyed implicitly and, second, that there are no keywords that could direct laypersons to the knowledge making this meaning obvious to legalists. I will conclude that any legal text having these traits is likely to appear incoherent to the general public and suggest that the traits making my example appear incoherent might be rather common among the various texts of the various legal systems. On this suggestion there is no need to assume any causal relation between lawyers' social interests and the apparent incoherence of legal language as it entails that this incoherence is inevitable. (I will argue that it is a result of the facts that legal language is ordinary language used, in the ordinary way, in the special context of the legal discourse.)
In this article I analyse linguistic means employed to reconstruct causality in court. Identifying the causal relations that induced the occurrence in reality is particularly important when the mental element of the offence is considered proving criminal intent is showing existence of a causal relation between an intention and a legally prohibited act.I show that the legal significance of an action depends on the time of the action relative to other events. I will show that in the legal-criminal discourse simultaneity implies causality. In particular, if discussing a concrete occurrence, an event is proved to be simultaneous or almost simultaneous with an action 脌 then causation between the action and the event is commonly implied if the event seems to the court as a reasonable motive for the particular action.I exemplify how the institutional speakers use time conjunctions indicating actions that happen simultaneously or almost simultaneously in order to prove existence of a causal relation, and how they present the simultaneity as incidental in order to deny existence of such a relation.
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