Lexico-Grammatical Analysis of Translated Japanese Immigration Law

• Main Author: Arciaga, Kasumi
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: grammatical analysis; Japanese law; immigration law; forensic linguistics; Discourse and Text Linguistics; Other Linguistics
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/jeal/vol1/iss2/6; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/jeal/article/1021/viewcontent/RA_5.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Legal language is a specialized language. However, it is not universal, although its uniqueness and specialty in every legal language are ubiquitous. The lexical and grammatical aspects of legal texts have not been the subject of much attention as there is an evident dearth of research on this aspect of the legal language. The present study is, therefore, the first study that has looked at lexical and grammatical features of the Japanese immigration law, which has been translated into English. The sum of 70,000 words in selected immigration acts, which were translated from 2020 to 2021, was used as data set in the present study. The result reveals that lengthy sentences and nominalized sentences along with verb discontinuities were prevalent in the present study. An interesting finding in the present study is the existence of fewer binominal and multinominal phrases, which contradicts the results from previous studies. The robust phenomenon of plain English movement may play a role in less frequent occurrences of multinominal phrases in the present study. This study provides some future pedagogical implications for legal texts that have been translated.