Abstract
A factor analysis of the corpus of Latvian legal documents issued during 1990–2022 reveals an increase of the use of ambiguous grammatical forms that obscure the regulatory enactments. Designating actions and their effects by indeclinable participles and verbs in conditional mood, the lawmaker does not attest to causality between the proposed procedure and the result sought, and does not acknowledge their intention to implement the procedure. The indicative mood and the infinitive forms designate actions and their effects explicitly, but their frequency tends to decrease. The frequency of usage of passive voice, debitive mood, and reflexive verbs demonstrates an upward trend; however, assessing the ambiguity of these grammatical forms requires a qualitative analysis of legal documents.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 168-185 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Letonica |
| Issue number | 53 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Keywords*
- ambiguous grammatical form
- corpus analysis
- factor analysis of language use
- Latvian language
- statistics of language use
Field of Science*
- 5.8 Media and Communication
Publication Type*
- 1.1. Scientific article indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus database