Exploring legal discourse: a sociosemiotic (re)construction

Legal discourse, as an umbrella term, could be used to address the whole spectrum studying legal phenomena, not only written, such as legislation, but also spoken, such as courtroom interaction, as well as non-verbal, such as physical evidence and the physical setup of courtroom. Legal discourse has been widely examined by scholars from various disciplines such as law (Scott 2009), discourse studies (Coulthard [1992] 2013), linguistics (Ervo 2016; Solan and Gales 2016), pragmatics (Mey 2016), politics (Habermas 1996), semiotics (Cheng and Sin 2008b), sociology (Chow and Yin 2018), and psychology (Levinson 2018; Wang and Tu 2018).

The nine papers selected and collected for the special issue touch upon three very important aspects of legal discourse: legal discourse on non-traditional security in cyber age, a relatively new and hot issue in modern society, and legal narrative and legal interpretation, two very traditional topics in legal domain. Social semiotics examines symbols from the perspective of the practice and application of symbols, shifting the focus of semiotics from the intrinsic features of symbols to the functions of symbols in social action and interaction (Cobley 2001). In the interpretation of meaning, emphasis on meaning is given, is dynamically interpreted.

This special issue, “Exploring Legal Discourse: A Sociosemiotic (Re)construction”, from a sociosemiotic perspective and treating legal discourse as one sign system, investigates legal discourse as one synergy within its own ambit on one hand, and interprets and explains the various representations of legal discourse against its interface with society as another sign system (Cheng, Gong, and Li 2017). In other words, to understand legal discourse as an intersemiotic operation between discourse, law and society (Cheng and Cheng 2014; Cheng, Cheng, and Sin 2014) may provide useful insights for examining law which is indispensible from society.

Legal discourse on non-traditional security in the cyber age

The contributions in the first part of this special issue, from a sociosemiotic perspective, show how legal discourse on non-traditional security pertinent to cyberspace is constructed dealing with a wide spectrum of non-traditional security areas in the cyber age, ranging from cybersecurity legislation, telecom and Internet fraud to cyber bullying. Cyberspace, as one of the “dual use” technologies, can be used for both benevolent and malicious purposes depending upon the intention of users (Kittichaisaree 2017), such as cyber bullying as well as telecom and Internet fraud investigated in this special issue. Due to the blurred boundaries between the real and the virtual, cyberspace, as a complex, ever-changing and unpredictable domain, gives rise to greater impossibility of pinning down meaning and strong necessity of discursively reconstructing cybersecurity and the relevant terms therein. For example, it is noted in Cheng and Pei (2018) that the same legal term regulated in different jurisdictions (e.g. sensitive information) can be deciphered in various ways depending on distinct legal systems, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) levels and social development situations, and the meaning of a legal term in a given jurisdiction (e.g. personal data and special categories of data in European Unions) may evolve over time. It thus suggests that being subject to the influence of “spatial and temporal manipulations” (Cheng and Cheng 2014, 165), a sign only acquires its meaning within a given context (Cheng, Cheng, and Sin 2014). Moreover, the intersemiotic dimension, which underlines the interaction between legal texts and other sign systems in a wider context such as cultural systems, social changes, economic shifts and human rights (Cheng, Gong, and Li 2017), plays a significant role in interpreting legal signs. Accordingly, the meaning of a sign is not fixed but continually in flux, socio-culturally determined and intertwined with other social practices.

As noted by Danesi (2009), one of the greatest conundrums in semiotics and linguistics lies in explaining why changes occur in communication systems. The sociosemiotic approach can serve as a feasible and effective means to tackle such a conundrum in that social semiotics focuses on the “social meanings constructed through the full range of semiotic forms, through semiotic texts and semiotic practices, in all kinds of human society at all periods of human history” (Hodge and Kress 1988, 261). To showcase the revolution and variation of non-traditional security and its concrete representations, the three papers in the first part probe into the ideological rationales behind the screen from a socio-semiotic perspective, both theoretically and practically. The research materials utilized in the three works are diverse, including both verbal signs (e.g. voice records, text messages and legal texts) and non-verbal signs (e.g. emojis) as well as both audio recording (e.g. voice records) and texts (e.g. text messages and legal texts).

Based on one specially created corpus of U.S. cybersecurity-related laws, Le Cheng, Jiamin Pei and Marcel Danesi, in their paper “A Sociosemiotic Interpretation of Cybersecurity in U.S. Legislative Discourse”, conduct a sociosemiotic analysis of how the referent objects and securitizing actors in U.S. cybersecurity legislative discourse are constructed through the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods. The corpus findings and sociosemiotic interpretation indicate that critical infrastructure, as a key referent object in cybersecurity, is subject to meaning evolution and variation, which can be attributed to different historical backgrounds, legislative intentions and “interest weighing” (Cheng and Cheng 2012, 417). In addition, distinct from traditional security that is “state-centric and military-oriented” (Caballero-Anthony 2016, 5), as one area of non-traditional security, cybersecurity highlights the significant role of private sectors and the public-private cooperation. The authors argue that the meanings of the signs constructing cybersecurity and cybersecurity itself reside in the specific contexts of time and space and are thus more open to change in the broader picture of security as well as under various historical and social backgrounds.

Anne Wagner, in her paper “E-Victimization and E-Predation Theory as the Dominant Aggressive Communication: The Case of Cyber Bullying”, focuses on how youngsters (ab)use e-medias to facilitate digital predation and lead to e-victimization. By examining the dynamics of violence, gender discrimination and power abuse leading to a semio-sphere, and identifying anonymity, exposure, frequency and insecurity as indicators of collective e-delinquency and proneness to e-victimization, the author conceptualizes a dominant e-communication and the e-victimization theory. Then, taking cyber bullying as an aggressive e-communication pattern, the author unravels how cyber bullying is constructed through the eyes of the law as and through the lens of verbal and non-verbal signs. The author therefore highlights that the meanings of signs, whether verbal or non-verbal, is highly context dependent. Cyber bullying, for example, as a nebulous sign, is prone to meaning variation under distinctive circumstances. It should be noted that nowadays it is only the clear “intent” and the “repetitive actions” that are considered in court.

Ning Ye, Le Cheng and Yun Zhao, in their paper “Identity Construction of Suspects in Telecom and Internet Fraud Discourse: From a Sociosemiotic Perspective”, taking telecom fraud discourse as one type of genre, investigate the dynamic process of fraudsters’ selecting and constructing identities by manipulating related discourse resources and strategies in the social-cultural context. Through the lens of sociosemiotic approach, the authors point out that the identity of discourse producers is not fixed but dynamically constructed in discursive practices and other social practices. Moreover, by constructing their identity as representatives of legal institutions, criminal suspects use the discourse resources to fabricate false information and construct false identities through discursive practices. Therefore, with respect to implications for telecom fraud prevention, the authors argue that the law enforcement and judicial officers need to construct their own identity as institutional representatives in their daily law enforcement and judicial activities.

Legal narrative

Legal narrative is binding on the essence of narrative as meaning-making in law-making. If we consider legal terms as individual but interactive signs within legal sign systems, legal signs can be deemed as “symbolic actions” (Fisher 1987, 38), which are historically and culturally grounded and shaped in the socio-political context (Fisher 1984; Habermas 1996; Cheng and Cheng 2014). That is, legal narrative presents not only the manipulation by law-makers and judges, but the ineluctable intersemotic interactions between legal terms and legal narrative to evidence and reinterpret legal ideology through the interactions of institutional powers, i.e. “institutional dialogue” (Cheng and Sin 2008a, 68).

In an effort to pursue the underlying intentions in legal discourse, the second part of this special issue focuses on the intersemiotic interactions of legal narrative in the socio-political contexts. The three papers in this part describe legal signs as the essential indicators of legal narrative, i.e. monetary sign by Kristian Bankov, lavascape sign by Sarah Maruseka, and rhetoric sign (writings and pictures) by Ronnie Lippens. More specifically, the practice and making of law is closely tied to other systems of knowledge (Gordon 2011; Cheng and Cheng 2014; Hunt 2017), for example, sociology, politics, culture and philosophy, as the semiotic network related with human personality and judicial thinking (Cheng 2010; Petrilli 2016; Ponzio 2016).

Kristian Bankov’s paper “From Gold to Futurity: A Semiotic Overview on Trust, Legal Tender and Fiat Money” positions the concepts of “fiat money” and “legal tender” in legal contexts as monetary signs, and examines their respective meaning constructions in the formations of their value and functions. Based on the underlying semiotic logic and mechanism of the money signs, Bankov proposes three types of money or economic exchanges, i.e. commodity money, representative money and fiat money. With the long cultural semiotization of these monetary signs, Bankov argues the process from gold to futurity as the semiotization of money, and elucidates the semiotic interpretations on trust, legal tender and fiat money by viewing them as the inherently semiotic phenomena involving manipulation. For Bankov, the financial crisis is just “a case” to apply the model of the fiat money, since the meaning is immanent to the formal relations inside the text phenomenon and the value of monetary signs is immanent to the internal relations of the law phenomenon.

Sarah Maruseka’s paper “Lavascape: Legal Spectacle at Kīlauea” examines the symbolic relationship between law and chaos after the eruption landscape of Kīlauea Volcano on Hawai’i Island. By identifying the influenced residential subdivisions as chaos, Maruseka examines the chaos in framing the legal spectacle of lava eruption as the legal imagination of human risk through legal semiotics, legal materiality and legal topology. For Maruseke, the movement of lava is a legal metaphor for order versus chaos, and the source of chaos is actually law itself. That is to say, what we see is what law wants us to see, while law asserts authority over the spectacle in the areas of sightseeing, access and mapping. Based on such an understanding, this study takes Kīlauea’s lavascape as example to illustrate the phenomenological framing of law’s incomplete jurisdiction over kinetic environments.

Together with Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting, Ronnie Lippens in his paper “Withdrawing (from) Waste, and the End of Law: Reflections on De Lillo’s Prophecies in Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997)” describes the rhetoric and figurative dimensions in Don De Lillo’s novels, prefiguring and configuring the conflicts of meaning systems within De Lillo’s identification and presentation. For Lippens, law in all its forms and shapes is forced to become an irrelevance but embarrassment in an age of operations by government administrations. After conceptualizing the notions of “waste” and “end of law”, he argues that the manifestation of this irreverent operation can interpret the imbalance of the potential and growing inability to accept waste, that is, an inability to live with all that generates law as waste, and an inability to live with all that is waste.

Legal interpretation

The previous investigations on the approaches to the ascertainment of sociosemiotic meaning in legal discourse indicate that any approach to legal interpretation depends on the views regarding meaning, language and social context and norms between the text, the linguistic system and the social structure (Cheng 2010). If we consider a more robust description in legal interpretation from the perspectives of semiotics and sociosemiotics, a broader context should be identified in the rhetoric and dialog. Meanwhile, the relationship in any social situation, given appropriate conditions, can be analogized as legal genres constructing the essential characteristics of the practice and process of interpretation and presentation.

While legal narrative focuses on the individual but interactive sign construction process in the capacity of evidence and authenticity, legal interpretation conceptualizes legal signs at the multifarious level (Fallon 2015; Cornell 2016), which are defined and appropriated by those using the term to serve different functions, i.e. “meaning making and intention manifestation” (Cheng and Cheng 2014, 169). Three papers in this part construct sign meaning from interlingual communication in political notes exchanges, national supervision system in legislation texts, and transparency mediation in legal discourse.

The paper “French Engagement versus British Commitment: Was it Interlingual Miscommunication or Political Manipulation?” by Aleksandra Matulewska and Marek Mikołajczyk explores the interlingual communication and negotiation within the broader socio-political and economic discourse. There exists the imbalanced and ineffective negotiation in the different meaning identification, for example, in understanding the French term engagement and its English equivalents employed by translators and interpreters. After the detailed analyses of notes exchanged between the governments of France and Great Britain at that time, the authors describe how meaning is constructed and evolved in the socio-political and legal contexts according to its own temporality and spatiality. This study notes that the negotiation goals and strategy of both sides, the French and British governments, have over-imposed a very specific interpretation of the communicated messages where the interlingual communication strategy adopted by translators and interpreters may have been utterly irrelevant for the overall outcome of the negotiation process.

Jian Li and Yuxiu Sun, in their paper “Meaning Construction in Legislative Discourse: A Sociosemiotic Interpretation on Supervision System Reform in China”, seek to interpret the reform of supervision system in China from the meaning-making process of the Supervision Law, and construct its successive meaning in relevant legislative texts. In this paper, it is suggested that the social construction of meaning is achieved and represented to the extent which is constructed through the representation and interpretation of law-making process by sign receivers or legal participants. Taking legal genre as both a sign and a sign system, the authors characterize this legislative genre as both a sign constructed in the external but relevant sign system, and a signifier reconstructed with the successive but infinite interpretants in the internal sign system. Such characterizations show the social construction of legislative meaning as infinite semiosis, while from the whole process of sign perception, reception, acceptation and interpretation, sign meaning can be constructed and institutionalized through legislative discourse.

Massimo Leone’s paper “The Observer Actant in the Contemporary Legal Discourse: A Semiotic Meditation” confronts the ideology in common that, according to similar representations of the actant observer, there is a semiotic macro-function that contributes the representation and distribution of information in a text. From this point of view, Leone constructs the arbitrariness as the ways in which societies disclose the core of their juridical action to their members, followed by a mechanism that changes through history and is essentially dictated by a dialectical ideology of transparency and opacity. It is argued that this dialectical ideology is from the more general and abstract configurations of the semiosphere, for example, the juridical aesthetics of a society. More interestingly, Leone proposes to link the socio-pathology of anorexia with several other practices and texts of contemporary culture that adopt the same rhetoric of transparency in other discursive arena, including that of law, which expresses a powerful influence on the present time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Le Cheng, Wei Shaoxiang Chair Professor, is a concurrent professor at School of International Studies and Guanghua Law School at Zhejiang University. He is currently Associate Dean of School of International Studies, Director of Institute of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Director of Center for Legal Discourse and Translation and Director of Center for Contemporary Chinese Discourse Studies at Zhejiang University. Additionally, he is the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Legal Discourse and Acting President of Multicultural Association of Law and Language. His main research interests include semiotics, language and law, terminology, and discourse studies.

Marcel Danesi is Professor in the Anthropology Department at University of Toronto, and Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica. His main research interests are linguistic anthropology, semiotics and youth culture.