Janny HC Leung

• The University of Hong Kong

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of learni...

This paper investigates how the equal authenticity principle, commonly adopted by balanced bilingual or multilingual jurisdictions, changes in meaning, value and function as it travels across jurisdictions with different sociopolitical realities. I illustrate how the framing of the concept has subtly shifted in the process of statutory drafting and...

Should fidelity in legal translation be judged in terms of approximation to the source text? What are the possible alternatives? Multilingual jurisdictions see great needs in the translation of texts of the law and tend to be particularly concerned with the uniform application of the law in its different renditions. As a response to new sources of...

The traditional implicit learning literature has focused primarily on the abstraction of statistical regularities in form-form connections. More attention has been recently directed toward the implicit learning of form-meaning connections, which might be crucial in the acquisition of natural languages. The current article reports evidence for impli...

Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form-meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning connection...

Social media companies regulate more speech than any government does, and yet how they moderate content on their platforms receives little public scrutiny. Two years ago, Meta (formerly Facebook) set up an oversight body, called the Oversight Board, that handles final appeals of content moderation decisions and issues policy recommendations. This a...

Literature abounds regarding media censorship in China, but relatively few studies show how this is linguistically realized, and what impact it has on Chinese media discourse. Using news coverage of migrant worker issues as a lens, this paper demonstrates convergence in reportage between commercial media and state media in China that took place in...

Otter’s Journey through Indigenous Language and Law Lindsay Keegitah Borrows (2018)

The increasing number of unrepresented litigants in various jurisdictions raises the question of what challenges these lay people face in their access to justice. This article seeks to examine this by conducting a small ethnographic study and survey in Hong Kong. Based on 6 hours of courtroom observation in two cases and 8 hours of pre-trial, durin...

L2 sounds present different kinds of challenges to learners at the phonetic, phonological, and lexical levels, but previous studies on L2 tone learning mostly focused on the phonetic and lexical levels. The present study employs an innovative technique to examine the role of prior tonal experience and musical training on forming novel abstract syll...

This chapter introduces the intertwined relationship between language, identity, politics, and law, and provides a road map for the book. It begins with an example of a language conflict that invites the reader to consider complexities involved in the promulgation of an official language law. It then outlines the steps that this book will take to h...

Having explored how official multilingualism has emerged as a product of historical and sociopolitical development, this chapter moves on to survey the extent of the phenomenon in the contemporary world. The data set offers a panoramic view of jurisdictions around the world that are officially bilingual or multilingual. Although there is not enough...

This chapter offers a historical account of how polities have operated in a linguistically diverse society. Although societal multilingualism has been commonplace throughout human civilization, official multilingualism is clearly a modern phenomenon. However, whether the use of a language is mandated by policy or law, or is a matter of convention,...

This chapter asks two questions about the nature of official language rights. The first is a practical one—whether and how official language law enhances language rights for the communities concerned. A comparative approach is taken to answer this question, which will also reveal situations where official language rights conflict with existing lega...

This chapter discusses the intricacies of interpreting multilingual legal texts. Multiplicity of legal languages potentially amplifies linguistic indeterminacy, which in turn contributes to legal indeterminacy. It would be a nightmare for a bilingual or multilingual jurisdiction if the application of two or more language versions of the law to the...

This chapter spells out major sociopolitical forces that have contributed to the widespread adoption of official multilingualism, and offers an explanation of how official multilingualism works through law. Jurisdictions that adopt multilingual law are primarily driven by pragmatic rather than normative forces. Official language law can perform a p...

This book offers a critical perspective to the proliferation of official multilingualism in the contemporary world. Through diachronic and synchronic comparisons, it shows that official multilingualism has become a norm in the political management of linguistic diversity, but actual practices vary according to sociohistorical contexts and current p...

This chapter compares some of the ways official multilingualism has transformed public institutions across jurisdictions, and comments on why these transformations fall short of expectations. This gap is a product of, among other things, the general lack of specificity in constitutional provisions. The status of official or national language does n...

Since equality is a foundation of liberalism and a moral norm, the value of linguistic equality is easily taken for granted. This chapter offers a characterization of linguistic equality as it is claimed and practiced in bilingual and multilingual jurisdictions today. It argues that shallow equality must not be confused with equality that is differ...

This chapter assesses the challenges in producing multilingual legal texts, especially where these texts are supposed to be equally authentic. The first of these challenges is translation. The risk is that a failure to achieve translation equivalence compromises legal certainty. Equivalence aside, there are also deeper political tensions in the pro...

Recently, six elected pro-democracy legislators in Hong Kong were stripped of their office for not having sworn their oath of office ‘properly’. In this paper I examine the incident through a law and humanities perspective, being concerned not only with the legality of the disqualification, but also with the people who experience the violence of th...

Legal practitioners, linguists, anthropologists, philosophers and others have all explored fundamental challenges presented by language in formulating, interpreting and applying laws. Building on centuries of interaction between legal practice and jurisprudence, the modern field of 'law and language', or 'forensic linguistics', brings insights in l...

Despite the growing interest in the phenomenon of learning without intention, the incidental learning of phonological features, especially prosodic features, has received relatively little attention. This paper reports an experiment on incidental learning of lexical stress rules, and investigates whether the resultant knowledge can be unconscious,...

Most current work in the interdisciplinary field of language and law focuses on a cluster of interrelated topics: the language of the law; language in legal processes; language as evidence; and the legal regulation of language use. Language rights is a less widely discussed and yet distinct intersection between language and law, which views law as...

Language plays an essential role both in creating law and in governing its implementation. Providing an accessible and comprehensive introduction to this subject, Language and Law: (1) describes the different registers and genres that make up spoken and written legal language and how they develop over time; (2) analyses real-life examples drawn fro...

This chapter looks at how performative speech acts take place in three different mediums: in speech, in writing, and in electronic communication. It considers the history of performativity in changing linguistic and social relations brought about by the shift from orality to literacy, and details challenges facing performatives that have accompanie...

This chapter introduces the concept of genre partly by contrast with linguistic register. It looks at how discourse genres function in law. The chapter illustrates how legal genres have developed by reference to the history of law reporting. Examining the genre of the law report brings different rewards depending on the perspective from which such...

This chapter describes a different perspective on language and law: how language used in situations other than 'legal' contexts – in general communication – is treated if it becomes the subject matter of litigation. It outlines the many ways in which verbal communication gets into trouble with the law, either by constituting criminal behaviour or w...

This chapter discusses claims and counterclaims that surround proposed reforms of legal language. It shows that why making changes to legal language is difficult by presenting a practical task based on an early English statute. Engaging with issues surrounding reform of legal language, either theoretically or practically, calls for more precise for...

This chapter considers the functions served by legal language, rather than describing what it looks or sounds like. It outlines accounts given by two influential writers on legal language of the goals and functions served by specific features of legal style. Some aspects of each of these accounts celebrate the effectiveness of legal language; other...

This chapter explores the similarities and differences between how meaning is understood in linguistic approaches to language and in statutory inter – pretation. It examines the reasoning developed in one among a large number of cases worldwide that have looked at the meaning of the word sculpture for the purpose of copyright law. The main question...

This chapter introduces the concept of legal language, perhaps the most obvious and traditionally debated intersection between language and law. It also introduces sociolinguistic concepts that help distinguish different kinds of linguistic variation. The phrase legal English is often used, for example, to mean competence in English for the legal w...

This chapter explores important kind of linguistic variation in legal discourse: variation by text type, or genre. It outlines the concept of genre and illustrates the most common legal text types. The chapter analyses how genres in law have developed historically, taking the example of the law report. It also analyses generic features of a statute...

This chapter looks at a practical aspect of how advertising language is regulated: whether an advert that has been complained about is misleading. It provides a brief outline of advertising regulation, then work through three non-broadcast adverts about which complaints were made to the UK advertising standards authority (ASA). The disputed text of...

This chapter looks at some examples of constraints on interaction in courtroom discourse, especially examples involving question-and-answer routines between lawyers and witnesses and the funnelling of witness narratives towards legally relevant points. Lay advocates are also responsible for cross-examining witnesses. Cross-examination is a highly s...

This chapter describes how linguistic knowledge can in some circumstances contribute to the functioning of law through an applied channel: that of forensic linguistics. It illustrates the variety of linguistic work that takes place under the heading forensic linguistics. The chapter also illustrates techniques involved in forensic linguistic analys...

This chapter explores a number of questions about the rhetorical strategies employed by lawyers in developing their case. It describes discourse strategies used at different stages in court proceedings: making an opening statement; presenting an account of the facts in issue by taking witnesses through examination-in-chief; cross-examining witnesse...

This chapter outlines the history of legal English and discusses specialised legal and social functions served by legal language. It considers arguments for and against reform of how legislation is written. The chapter introduces each of these themes by showing how the distinctive features of modern legal English are the result of sociolinguistic c...

This chapter presents two extracts that tackle arguments for and against reform of legal language from a practical, campaigning perspective. The two extracts are arguments against plain English drafting valid and the legitimacy conferred by ordinary language. In the UK, an organisation called the Plain English Campaign describes itself as 'fighting...

This chapter considers how the courts resolved the disputed meaning of the terms in question. It presents extracts which are taken from a series of US cases that dealt with the meaning of 'carrying' or 'using' a firearm: an offence contained in the firearms chapter of the federal criminal code, a provision that carries a five-year mandatory prison...

From a linguist's descriptive point of view, all language varieties are equal; value judgements are irrelevant. This phenomenon is perhaps most focused linguistically on accents, especially contrasts between urban and rural accents. Such attitudes may also be directed towards whole dialects and generational language styles. The rush to linguistic j...

This chapter shows how emphasis in law on singular, correct interpretation differs from the descriptive and explanatory approach adopted in linguistics. It considers the reasoning processes used in 'construction' to arrive at the meaning of problematic words and phrases in texts whose legal effect depends on their legislative purpose, not only on t...

Welsh and English are both official languages of the country: the Welsh Language Act 1993 places Welsh on equal footing with English in Wales. As a result of this legislation, defendants enjoy a right to have their case heard in Welsh before a Welsh-speaking judge, if they request this. A more difficult question, however, is whether competence in W...

This chapter looks at an extract from perhaps the most recognisable legal genre: the statute. Statutes state what the law is. But the present division of labour between legal professionals and the general public is reflected in the fact that statutes are rarely read outside the legal profession. Reading a statute, calls for familiarity with basic g...

This chapter presents two short extracts that examine common presumptions held about legal language. The extracts are the precision of legal language and the different senses of 'law as a profession of words'. The first extract, not inappropriately in view of the author's status as virtually founder of the modern study of legal language, comes from...

This chapter addresses the specific question whether legal concepts merely describe, actively give effect to, or obscure social power. It introduces two key concepts at the intersection between any society's political and legal spheres: power and order. The chapter explains why use of such words is difficult to disentangle when thinking about legal...

This chapter introduces and discusses the main features of courtroom persuasion. Pragmatic techniques adopted in courtroom advocacy include strategic use of interruption, repetition, overlapping speech; and dramatic silence. In a courtroom context, one way of appearing likeable is to accommodate linguistically to jurors, since psychological researc...

This chapter describes the interaction that takes place between the idea of legal order and linguistic diversity, in arrangements known as legal bilingualism or multilingualism: the organisation of legal systems to function in two or more languages. It examines complications and challenges associated with such legal-linguistic structures. Legal tra...

This chapter describes the main determinants of spoken language styles used in courtrooms. Even within a specialised legal setting, speech style co-varies with participant roles and with different stages in legal proceedings. The chapter introduces the speech styles used by advocates, which form a distinct kind of adversarial rhetoric. Speech style...

This chapter looks at linguistic approaches based on speech act theory that suggest that it does. It also looks at linguistic 'performatives', as enablers of action, before addressing the question of how performative speech acts relate to the wider practice of devising and following legal 'rules'. Speech act theory has been very influential in ling...

This chapter shows that an article by Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky: 'Silencing John Doe: defamation and discourse in cyberspace'. Lidsky's article focuses on a category of US libel suits that grew rapidly with the rise of the Internet: actions brought by large companies against unnamed Internet-user defendants. The chapter focuses on a more serious chall...

This chapter explains how forensic analysis is performed in a selection of cases and asks some more specific questions: What analytical tools are available? How are those tools used? What are the main challenges associated with forensic linguistic approaches, for instance as regards the reliability of evidence presented? Forensic discourse analysis...

This chapter presents two extracts. First extract works through John Searle's speech act categories, pointing out legal connections and implications. Searle distinguishes between speech acts whose illocutionary force or point is strong, such as testifying, and those whose illocutionary point is weak, such as asserting, and stating. Second extract f...

This chapter explores some kinds of data that a forensic linguist may work with to illustrate how linguistic evidence is analysed and presented in legal contexts. Despite people's often very careful efforts at linguistic disguise, habits of language use can still expose someone's individual and social identity. Specific features of a speaker's idio...

This chapter examines the discourse that results when legal professionals interact with laypeople during court proceedings involving a jury. It shows that a tension between two different ways of talking about, and in fact conceptualising, what is going on in a trial. One uses genre features associated with crime narrative; the other uses resources...

This chapter explores how courts resolve linguistic indeterminacy in bilingual and multilingual jurisdictions. Two major kinds of linguistic indeterminacy contribute to legal indeterminacy in statutory interpretation. The two linguistic indeterminacies are Intralingual indeterminacy and interlingual indeterminacy. Having two or more legislative tex...

This chapter outlines the role of contextual interpretation in legal meaning. It considers alternative judicial approaches to legal interpretation. The chapter introduces the question of how closely approaches to interpreting legal texts should be expected to resemble linguistic understanding of the ways meaning is created in everyday language use....

This chapter examines a number of specific linguistic challenges involved in bilingual and multilingual legal systems. It considers what makes translation of legal texts particularly difficult, describes cross-cultural communication barriers that exist in the courtroom, and examines how legal meaning is decided for divergent language texts of the s...

This chapter shows how courtroom persuasion by lawyers is 'rhetorical' in the historical meaning of 'rhetoric', which combines eloquence with strategic patterns of reasoning and expected standards of proof. It presents an outline of moves and structures that together make up the advocacy involved in legal proceedings. Because modern courtroom speec...

This chapter presents two extracts that each look, in different ways, at aspects of judicial interpretation from the perspective of linguistics and cognitive science/psychology. The two extracts are two approaches to meaning and legal construction and relevance theory and legal interpretation. L. Solan identifies challenges in the availability of t...

This chapter focuses on how the meaning and effect of utterances is decided in fields including media law and the law governing public order, where uses of language may, for example, be alleged to be offensive, threatening, defamatory, an incitement to racial or religious hatred, or a commercial misrepresentation. It also examines how courts often...

This chapter presents two extracts, each of which explores what it means to describe the language of lawyers as a specialised, acquired 'rhetoric'. First extract examines the training in language that law students receive before they qualify. Rather than focusing, as in advocacy manuals, on particular techniques, the extract explores a deeper, ideo...

Fields including conversation analysis have shown that everyday verbal interaction is highly structured and rule-governed. This chapter aims to describe courtroom discourse more precisely, by looking at how the verbal interaction involved consists of specific moves and sequences. It considers the higher-order organisation of courtroom discourse int...

This chapter looks at courtroom discourse from a descriptive, third-person perspective. The story told in opening statement is itself the result of earlier conversations, those between lawyer and client, conversations that have their own rhetoric. Since the lawyer is ethically obliged to defer to his client's "objectives" and different factual theo...

This chapter looks at the main features that have been attributed to the variety usually known as 'legal English'. It provides a review of descriptive accounts by other influential scholars, including David Mellinkoff and P. Tiersma. D. Crystal and D. Davy's description of legal language predates large-scale corpus analysis in linguistics. The chap...

The courtroom can be seen as a semiotic space where the practice of signs is institutionalized. There are specific ways to perform signs in court, be they verbal (e. g., turn-taking) or nonverbal (e. g., attire). Legal signs communicate and signify differently than their non-legal counterparts. Laypeople may not be aware of such differences, and ma...

Confession has for centuries been known as the queen of evidence. This paper examines an unusual type of confessions – ones that are made in public and out of court, the main target audience of which is not legal enforcement or court officers but the generic public. Operating in the margins of law, these confessions may make legal procedures redund...

Canada has a global reputation as a diverse and tolerant country, with linguistic duality being a proud marker of its pluralistic society and a defining feature of its nationhood. This paper evaluates the extent to which legal bilingualism as practiced in Canada provides a good and practicable model to the rest of the world, which has seen a rise i...

This chapter considers how the pragmatic dimension of meaning should be understood in relation to the language of law in particular. It outlines a number of factors which complicate the interpretation of legal texts. The chapter describes how interpretation in law has treated indirect and implied meaning. It examines how far further dialogue betwee...

About a quarter of legal jurisdictions in the world operate in more than one language. Despite this, language policies governing the functioning of law in such jurisdictions, other than in the European Union, rarely receive much attention in research. Given, however, that the policy contrast between legal monolingualism and multilingualism is often...

This socio-legal study empirically assesses the use of plain language in improving comprehension of legal reference texts by laypeople in Hong Kong, where common- law Chinese was newly engineered. Our study shows that native Chinese speakers have problems understanding the materials, but simple modifications of the texts can significantly improve t...

From Llewellyn (1930) to Mertz (2007), scholars have likened learning the law to learning a language. Not only does the legal dictionary serve as a practical guide to the language of the law for students, translators, and legal interpreters, the scholarship of legal lexicography can also contribute to constructing a picture of the evolution and tra...

Many jurisdictions have recently experienced a significant increase in the number of litigants in person (LiPs) in their civil justice systems; related re-search (e.g. Baldacci, 2006; Moorhead, 2007; Richardson et al., 2012; Zuckerman,2014) has assessed the impact of this on the legal system. In postcolonial Hong Kong, implementation of legal bilin...

[Adapted from publisher-provided promotional materials by English Book Review Editor, Janny HC Leung]M. Catherine Gruber (2014) I’m Sorry for What I’ve Done: The Language of Courtroom Apologies. Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN: 978-0-19-932566-5This book examines 52 apologetic allocutions produced during federal sentencing hearings. The practice...

This article reports an experiment on the implicit learning of second language stress regularities, and presents a methodological innovation on awareness measurement. After practising two-syllable Spanish words, native Cantonese speakers with English as a second language (L2) completed a judgement task. Critical items differed only in placement of...

One issue in multilingual cognition is whether there is a unitary or two conceptual systems that map onto different languages. This chapter addresses this issue by exploring whether and how prototypicality effects manifest in L2 vocabulary learning. In our two-step study we first used free sense-listing and prototypicality-rating tasks to locate cu...

A translated text shall be the same as the original text. This simple and often assumed, but hardly incontrovertible, requirement provides the foundation of the language policy of many bilingual or multilingual jurisdictions (hereafter bilingual jurisdictions). An important question associated with the proposition persists, however, regarding the k...

At the time of writing, the Occupy Central Movement (or the ‘Umbrella Revolution’, as it has become known in the international media) is in full swing in Hong Kong. Spearheaded by two professors and a Baptist minister, it dovetailed with local student movements and quickly expanded into a demonstration encompassing people from different walks of Ho...

One less obvious impact of legal bilingualism in a postcolonial jurisdiction like Hong Kong is an increasing trend of unrepresented litigants. Since their lack of legal knowledge often places them at a disadvantage and poses numerous problems in court, the government has established the resource centre for unrepresented litigants to offer them info...

This chapter examines the reportage on the Edison Chen sex photo scandal in Hong Kong. Chen, a popular actor and singer, took pictures of himself and his various sexual partners, and the pictures were leaked onto the internet in late 2007 and early 2008. The incident received widespread coverage in the local media. This article examines the constru...

This article presents how legal bilingualism, especially the use of the local language in postcolonial Hong Kong courtrooms, impacts upon judicial behaviour. Through analysing recent cases where local judges seem to be wearing many new hats, I will explore the dynamic relationship between language code and judicial practice, and argue that the use...

Peter Skehan (1944– ) is a British linguist whose main research focus revolves around individual differences (especially language aptitude) and second language acquisition.

Richard W. Schmidt (1941– ) is a versatile linguist whose primary research area is in the role of cognitive and affective factors, such as attention, awareness, and motivation, in adult second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign-language learning.

Jan H. Hulstijn (1947– ) is a Dutch scholar whose research is primarily concerned with incidental and intentional second language (L2) vocabulary learning, implicit and explicit L2 grammar learning, automatization of L2 lower-order processing skills, and language proficiency (lp). Keywords: language teaching; psycholinguistics; second language ac...

A contemporary phenomenon – multiplicity of authentic sources of law in different languages – complicates the process of statutory interpretation. In multilingual jurisdictions, problems arise when a literal interpretation of authentic versions of the law leads to inconsistent outcomes. Jurisdictions resolve such inconsistency in different ways. Th...

This paper reports two experiments on the implicit learning of second language word stress rules and presents a methodological innovation. In both experiments L1 Cantonese L2 English participants practised pronouncing two-syllable Spanish words. Learning of a hidden stress regularity was measured by a judgment task. We assessed participants' awaren...

This paper takes a bottom-up approach to empirically investigate how people construct the meaning of obscenity, and offers an experientialist, cognitive linguistic account to explain why the term appears to defy definition and makes a problematic legal concept. To study the contextual dependence of the term, we examined the extent to which various...

We report two experiments that used derived attention paradigms to examine implicit learning of associations between forms and meanings in semi-artificial languages. Both experiments examined learning of rules governing article usage, and the dependent measure was the time to locate objects referred to by article-plus-noun expressions in pictures....