Legal Ambiguities: What can psycholinguistics tell us?
Janet Randall, Lawrence Solan
June 2023
 

Legal language is often ambiguous. Consider a parking regulation: Only cars and trucks with permits are allowed. Does the prepositional phrase (PP) modifier [with permits]have “wide scope” ( over both nouns, [cars and trucks]) or “narrow scope” (over only [trucks])? To decide, judges look for the “ordinary” interpretation, or how most people would understand the phrase. To back up their decision, they often reference a canon of interpretation called the ‘Last Antecedent Rule’, which prescribes narrow scope. For some cases, however, they choose a wide-scope interpretation, aligning with a different–and conflicting–canon, the ‘Series Qualifier Canon’. With this kind of flux, we, as psycholinguists, set out to find evidence for how “most people”, those without practice reading legal texts, interpret PP modifiers. In our first two experiments, which focused on conjoined nouns, we found (a) a strong wide-scope preference when the PP is unbiased, as in [cars and trucks with permits], which (b) decreases significantly when the PP is semantically biased toward the last conjunct [cars and trucks without trailers] but strikingly (c) does not decrease at all when the bias is toward the first conjunct [trucks and cars without trailers]. In that case, a syntactic principle prevents the semantic bias from having an effect, and the wide-scope preference persists. Our third experiment focused on PPs that modify verbs as in [people may park cars and trucks on weekends]. Here we found even stronger evidence for a wide-scope interpretation, suggesting that VP modifiers are correctly interpreted as modifying the verb [park], not mistakenly interpreted as modifying the nouns [(cars and) trucks]. Our three experiments together show that psycholinguistic evidence can be extremely valuable in our efforts to understand legal language as the drafters intended it.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007352
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Boston, Massachusetts
keywords: linguistics & law, syntactic ambiguity, psycholinguistics, legal language, experimental linguistics, semantics, syntax
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