Multiple Negatives in Legal Language: the Case of English, Italian and Spanish

Negative sentences have been extensively studied in European and Asian languages (cf., for example, Jespersen 1917, Pullum & Huddleston 200, Manzotti & Rigamonti 1991, Bosque 1980, Sánchez López 1999) as a ‘pragmatic universal’: every language has some means of expressing negation (Bernini & Ramat 1996: 1). However, so far few studies have been devoted to double or multiple negatives, especially from a cross-linguistic perspective in languages for special purposes. As far as legal language is concerned, the topic has been tackled almost exclusively with relation to the simplification of legal and judicial writing (cf., among others, Charrow et al. 1986, Cortelazzo & Pellegrino 2003, CMDS 2011). Many scholars agree that it is a striking feature of legalese (cf. Mellinkoff 1963), but there seem to be a gap in the literature on the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of this trait, particularly from a contrastive perspective. The present quali-quantative study relies on an extensive trilingual corpus of legal texts providing the test bed for semi-automatic discourse analyses. By identifying and classifying the typical constructs of multiple negation in English, Italian and Spanish legal texts, the paper provides evidence of the linguistic resources leading to one of the main distinctive features of legal language. Furthermore, the pragmatic and rhetorical effects achieved through multiple negatives in all three languages are compared and contrasted. In the wake of the plain language movement, the results yielded from the analysis will also be used to put forward proposals for the simplification of legal texts, when multiple negation seems to be a feature adopted for stylistic rather than functional purposes.