Who’s afraid of the passive? A corpus-study of passives in two legal genres and their simplified Plain English versions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56498/1212024611Keywords:
plain language, law, phraseology, popularizationAbstract
Plain language is “communication that is comprehended the first time it is encountered, and
which relies on textual features such as active voice and common terms” (Rossetti et al., 2020).
In the last decades, government agencies in the English-speaking world have encouraged
the use of plain English not only in legislative or judicial settings, but also in the
communication between legal institutions and non-expert law users. Plain English is based on
linguistic recommendations, which include avoiding difficult vocabulary or legalterminology,
and keeping sentences short. Avoiding the passive is by far the most frequent of these
recommendations. Although research has focused on the evolution of passives in legal settings
(Williams 2015, 2022), few studies have investigated its use in Plain legal texts published for
lay readers. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the recommendation to avoid the
passive is actually applied in legal popularization texts that address the general public. We
studied the frequency of passives in two legalese corpora, made up of legislative texts from the
United Kingdom and New Zealand, and of judgements from the Supreme Court of Canada.
These specialized corpora were compared with their Plain English versions. Canonical and
non-canonical passives were examined quantitatively. Using a lexico-grammatical approach,
contexts were then studied to try to identify possible phraseological patterns centered around
passive. Qualitative analyses were performed to identify the rhetorical functions of the passive
in our corpora, especially in the Plain English texts. Our results confirm that the passive is a
crucial feature of specialized legal phraseology. However, our analysis also suggests that the
passive is also used in canonical and non-canonical forms in Plain English texts. Added to
other typical features of popularization and knowledge dissemination, it appears that the
passive helps recontextualize legal knowledge towards human actors and law users.
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