Coulter, Elizabeth Caroline; (2023) "Always speaking”: a relevance-theoretic approach to statutory interpretation. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Linguists and legal theorists have considered whether theories of linguistic communication apply to the creation and interpretation of legal texts. This thesis considers the application of one theory of linguistic communication, relevance theory, to statutory interpretation. Relevance theory posits that linguistic communication is an inferential process grounded in the recognition of speaker intentions. The thesis considers a) whether legislating is a communicative act and b) whether legislatures hold group informative/communicative intentions, as ordinary speakers do. It concludes: a) legislating is an act of communication of a limited kind - legislatures communicate their intention to enact a text, and b) while there is no theoretical reason why a legislature could not hold such group intentions, for practical reasons they do not. What judges do in interpretation is recover what could be termed an “as if” intention, effectively seeking to recover the intentions of the drafter “as if” they were the intentions of the legislature. The thesis also considers legislating as a speech act. It is argued that it is generally the explicature of the text – its enriched, explicit content – that judges seek to recover, especially in the case of onerous provisions. The role of implicatures is limited, due to the particular implicated premises applied by judges which derive from the conventions and assumptions used in statutory interpretation. The thesis looks at statutory interpretation in comparison with literary interpretation, considering the work of Marmor and Lewis on closed prefixed contexts, comparing authorial intention with legislative intention, and looking at the very different roles for implicature in both kinds of texts. The thesis concludes that relevance theory can provide an account of statutory interpretation, while statutory interpretation in practice provides evidence supporting the relevance-theoretic notion of explicature. Some awareness among drafters and judges of cognitive processes involved in communication would aid the development of consistent and fair interpretive practice.

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