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Between Conciseness and Transparency: Presuppositions in Legislative Texts

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International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Presupposition is the semantic-pragmatic phenomenon whereby a statement contains an implicit precondition that must be taken for granted (presupposed) for that statement to be felicitous. This article discusses the role of presupposition in legislative texts, using examples from Swiss constitutional and administrative law. It illustrates (a) how presuppositions are triggered in these texts and (b) what functions they come to serve, placing special emphasis on their constitutive power. It also demonstrates (c) how legislative drafters can distinguish between “good” presuppositions and “bad” presuppositions by weighing their main advantage, conciseness, against their main flaw, reduced transparency. The present study argues that, if employed carefully, presuppositions can be a useful stylistic means to keep legislative texts free from unnecessary clutter that merely elaborates on the obvious; however, it also suggests that, if applied wrongly, presuppositions can camouflage the duties and obligations placed on the subjects of a law and thus impede its accessibility and its efficient and effective implementation.

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Notes

  1. Marmor [15, 16, 17] refers to the respective set of phenomena as “semantically implied content” or “semantically encoded implication/semantically encoded presupposition”.

  2. Swiss federal law is drafted in German and in French and then translated into Italian. Once published, all three language versions are considered equally authentic [14]. In this paper, I will specifically look at examples from German-language texts. For each example, I will provide the authentic German wording as well as a translation into English.

  3. Proponents of the latter mostly argue that presuppositions represent a form of implicature.

  4. Beaver and Guerts point out that “[i]t makes sense to try several such embeddings when testing for presupposition, because it is not always clear how to apply a given embedding diagnostic. Thus, for example, […] although it is widely agreed that too is a presupposition-inducing expression, the negation test is awkward to apply in this case” [3, p. 2435].

  5. For a general discussion of the use of shall in English-language legislative texts, cf. [31].

  6. The definite description the Queen here refers to Queen Victoria (reign 1837–1901).

  7. Moreover, the role of the newly-created Federal Assembly corresponded to the role that the Diet had in the Old Swiss Confederacy. The use of a presupposition may thus also have been aimed at expressing an element of constitutional continuity.

  8. http://www.parlament.ch > Dokumentation > Berichte > Vernehmlassungen > 11.446—Pa.Iv. Für ein Auslandschweizergesetz (last visited on 22/10/2013).

  9. The role of the drafting committee of the Swiss federal administration has been discussed in [19].

  10. Compare the wording in the authentic French version: “Les barèmes, les taux et les montants exonérés de l’impôt, notamment, ne sont pas soumis à l’harmonisation fiscale.

  11. In the present case, the negation test cannot be used to assess whether the implied content is a presupposition: it is unclear how a sentence that contains the adverbial in particular is to be negated (cf. Beaver and Guerts [3, p. 2435] on the related problem of negating sentences containing the adverb too). However, the implied content can be shown to be a presupposition because it is preserved if the statement is transformed into a question: Are tax scales, tax rates, and tax allowances in particular excepted from harmonisation?

  12. Note that there is a second presupposition in sentence (18), triggered by the modal adverbial according to the following criteria (cf. Sect. 3.2): the procedural provision that the eligibility of an institution needs to be assessed by the CTI is in fact also merely presupposed rather than asserted. The sentence thus contains the following three provisions: (a) that to be eligible for grants, research institutions must be non-commercial, (b) that the eligibility of research institutions must be assessed by the CTI, and (c) that said assessment must be made according to the criteria listed thereafter. Only (c) is asserted, (a) and (b) are merely presupposed.

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Acknowledgments

The work presented in this article was funded under Swiss National Science Foundation Grant No. 134701. It has benefited from regular exchanges with the Central Language Services of the Swiss Federal Chancellery.

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  1. Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, 8050, Zurich, Switzerland

    Stefan Höfler

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Höfler, S. Between Conciseness and Transparency: Presuppositions in Legislative Texts. Int J Semiot Law 27, 627–644 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9337-6

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