The purpose of this paper is to examine accessibility in legal texts, in this case German tenancy contracts.
Legal texts can use a citizen perspective or a court perspective (Gunnarsson 1982) and give preference to
the understanding of the parties involved in the contract or to the judging by the judge in case of a
litigation between the parties.
On the one hand tradition demands that LSP texts are unambiguous, exact, economical (Fluck 1996),
which gives them some conventional linguistic features, usually considered to make the texts difficult, on
the other hand there is a legal demand that contracts must be accessible to non-professionals who have
less knowledge of genre and linguistic conventions, and this may entail that legal language is changed
accordingly.
I wish to show what kinds of differences might exist between contracts between professionals and
contracts between professionals and non-professionals if the text producer takes into account the lack of
knowledge of the non-professional involved in the contract. My – mostly qualitative – analysis, on the
basis of a model of analysis that I developed for these studies, shows that non-professional contracts are
modified in linguistic categories (“lexis” and “syntax”) and in a content related category (“references and
intertextuality”).
The results provide knowledge about LSP and linguistic features of legal language, more precisely of
different types of contracts, i.e. language in use. They can be used for didactic purposes in teaching legal
language and also by language and law professionals for acquiring knowledge on contracts in relation to
non-professionals.
The paper will be presented in German.
Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise: Lagtexters begriplighet. Lund: LiberFörlag (1982)
Fluck, Hans-Rüdiger: Fachsprachen. Einführung und Bibliographie. 5. Aufl. Tübingen / Basel: A. Francke
Verlag (1996)