Abstract
Syntactic discontinuity is a grammatical phenomenon in which a constituent of a sentence is split into two parts due to the insertion of an element which is not part of it or the movement of a constituent to a position which is not its canonical one. Sentences with syntactic discontinuity convey the same literal meaning given by them without it. Thus, legislators manipulate such constituents in Legislations since they offer them various styles of writing which may help to express the Legislations clearly and adequately. Hence, the present study attempts to test the hypotheses that syntactic discontinuities are varied and frequently used in legal texts and the sentences with syntactic discontinuity have specific structural characteristics. For the purpose of testing these hypotheses, the official English versions of ten Iraqi legal texts is issued between 1999- 2002.
To find out the frequency of occurrence of syntactic discontinuity in the accurances selected texts, the study includes calculating their rates. Analysis of the data has shown that five types of syntactic discontinuity are used by legislators. The study concludes that syntactic discontinuities are widely used, i.e. (118) times, in the analysed texts; this is so due to the need for long sentences which involve many details to make the Law as clear and interpretable as possible to the average readers as well as to the specialists. On the basis of the conclusions a number of suggestions have been proposed. These can be of assistance to the specialists as well as the average reader who needs to understand and correctly interpret the legal texts.
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