On the Semantic Difference of Judicial and Standard Language

Gregor Behnke, Niklas Wais

Abstract: Legal language is considered to be a key obstacle to the comprehensibility of court decisions for laypeople. While differences between written 'standard' and legal language have already been analysed with regard to syntactic peculiarities, there is still a lack of findings on the influence of divergent word meanings on comprehensibility. We present the course and the preliminary results of a study elaborating such ambiguities on the basis of over half a million German court decisions. As these differences are highly language-dependent, our study consequentially relates (only) to German.