Janny H. C. Leung

The Implicit Learning of Mappings between Forms and Contextually Derived Meanings

The traditional implicit learning literature focused primarily on the abstraction of statistical regularities in form-form connections. More attention has been directed toward the implicit learning of form-meaning connections recently, which might be crucial in the acquisition of natural languages. The current article reports evidence for implicit learning of a mapping between a novel set of determiners and thematic roles, obtained using a newly developed reaction time method- ology. The results conclude that contextually derived form-meaning connections might be implicitly learned.

CROSSLINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES IN IMPLICIT LANGUAGE LEARNING

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and noun animacy. In Experiment 2, neither group showed learning of a mapping between articles and a linguistically anomalous concept (the number of capital letters in an English word or that of strokes in a Chinese character). In Experiment 3, the Chinese group, but not the English group, showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and a concept derived from the Chinese classifier system. It was concluded that first language knowledge affected implicit language learning and that implicit learning, at least when natural language learning is concerned, is subject to constraints and biases.

Implicit learning of L2 word stress regularities

This article reports an experiment on the implicit learning of second language stress regularities, and presents a methodological innovation on awareness measurement. After practising two-syllable Spanish words, native Cantonese speakers with English as a second language (L2) completed a judgement task. Critical items differed only in placement of stress. We assessed participants’ awareness of the hidden stress regularities by verbal reports and a novel methodology: inclusion–exclusion production tasks adapted from Jacoby (1991) and from Destrebecqz and Cleeremans (2001). Participants who remained unaware of the underlying regularities nevertheless performed significantly above chance in identifying correctly pronounced novel words. We conclude that L2 word stress regularities may be learnt implicitly.

Statutory interpretation in multilingual jurisdictions: typology and trends

A contemporary phenomenon – multiplicity of authentic sources of law in different languages – complicates the process of statutory interpretation. In multilingual jurisdictions, problems arise when a literal interpretation of authentic versions of the law leads to inconsistent outcomes. Jurisdictions resolve such inconsistency in different ways. This article identifies converging trends and diverging practices in multilingual interpretation by comparing various jurisdictions and explains the phenomena by placing the jurisdictions in their social, historical and political contexts. I will then attempt to sketch a typology of legal multilingualism and analyse its significance to interpretation theories. I conclude that legal multilingualism has caused a shift in interpretation dynamics and fuelled a conceptualisation of the law that is distant from the text that formulates it, forcing one to rethink the relationship between language and the law.

Cross-jurisdiction appropriation of the equal authenticity principle

This paper investigates how the equal authenticity principle, commonly adopted by balanced bilingual or multilingual jurisdictions, changes in meaning, value and function as it travels across jurisdictions with different sociopolitical realities. I illustrate how the framing of the concept has subtly shifted in the process of statutory drafting and interpretation when it was appropriated by the Hong Kong judiciary, in contrast with the way the idea was first conceived and applied in Canada and later in international treaties, especially in situations where discrepancies between two language texts are alleged. I argue that the surface similarity between the equal authenticity principle applied in international treaties, Canada and Hong Kong can be misleading, and that subtle shifts in the meaning of equal authenticity can critically affect the outcome of a case. The paper highlights legal bilingualism/multilingualism as an important but often overlooked facet of legal pluralism and draws attention to how the use of linguistic approaches may add to the existing literature in legal pluralism.

Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts, edited by Marianne Constable

It is hard to find an insight about language that has a more profound and lasting influence on legal scholarship than John Langshaw Austin’s discovery that words do rather more than merely assert things. Marianne Constable’s Our Word Is Our Bond is a new addition to a series of work, broadly situated in the interdisciplinary field of language and law, that attempts to understand what law is and how it works through constructing legal events as speech acts, a la J. L. Austin and John R. Searle (who developed Austin’s idea of performative utterances into a theory of speech acts). Notably, Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart, a contemporary and an acquaintance of Austin, turns to language in The Concept of Law (1961) and describes the open texture of law as an inherent property of language. Half a century later, Austin’s work continues to inspire. For example, Stanford Schane analyses contract formation as a cooperative speech act and shows that the felicity conditions of a non-defective promise proposed by Searle can be adapted and mapped onto the legal criteria for the valid formation of a contract. Similarly, Bruce Fraser identifies the felicity conditions of a threat, which help distinguish threat from related speech acts such as predictions, promise, and warning. Constable offers a number of observations that distinguish her contribution in this line of work. First, drawing from the work of Stanley Cavell, Constable notes that not all legal speech acts are constatives or performatives. Some legal utterances are ‘passionate’ and contain a desire to persuade and to make claims. This perspective emphasizes the role of the hearer, which is particularly pertinent to the abundant legal situations that attach significance to the act of reception and the felicity conditions (such as the requirement of acknowledgement and witnessing) associated with it. Moreover, instead of focusing on individual legal events, Constable draws attention to the way legal events are intertwined, similar to the way texts build upon one another. She points out that it is through such intertextuality that legal speech acts make claims about law. These claims are often susceptible to interpretation and reinterpretation in the light of future events. This ambitious monograph presents a descriptive jurisprudence through its treatment of law as language. Constable aptly critiques legal positivism for seeing

Implicit knowledge of lexical stress rules: Evidence from the combined use of subjective and objective awareness measures

Despite the growing interest in the phenomenon of learning without intention, the incidental learning of phonological features, especially prosodic features, has received relatively little attention. This paper reports an experiment on incidental learning of lexical stress rules, and investigates whether the resultant knowledge can be unconscious, abstract, and rule based. Participants were incidentally exposed to a lexical stress system where stress location of a word is mainly determined by the final phoneme, syllable type, and syllable weight. Learning was assessed by a pronunciation judgment task. Results indicate that participants were able to transfer their knowledge of stress patterns to novel words whose final phoneme was not previously encountered, suggesting that participants had acquired abstract and potentially rule-based knowledge. The combined use of subjective and objective measures of awareness in the present study provides a strong piece of evidence of the acquisition of implicit knowledge.

'You have to teach the judge what to do': Semiotic gaps between unrepresented litigants and the common law

Abstract The courtroom can be seen as a semiotic space where the practice of signs is institutionalized. There are specific ways to perform signs in court, be they verbal (e. g., turn-taking) or nonverbal (e. g., attire). Legal signs communicate and signify differently than their non-legal counterparts. Laypeople may not be aware of such differences, and may encounter a gap between their expectation and the actual practice of legal signs. This is precisely the case for unrepresented litigants, laypeople who go to court without legal counsel, whose understanding and practice of signs usually differ from legal ones given their limited exposure to legal knowledge and culture. This paper examines unrepresented litigants’ lay practice of signs in Hong Kong courtrooms, and analyses how it clashes with that used by legal professionals. Our data consist of courtroom observations of 54 Cantonese case managements and 13 Cantonese trials in district courts in Hong Kong, 10 interviews with unrepresented litigants and 6 relevant judgments. The paper shows that the differences in the use of semiotics often place laypeople as out-group members of the law and may limit their access to justice. Our analysis will contribute to an understanding of laypeople’s behavior in the courtroom, which in turn bridges the communication gap between laypeople and legal professionals in common law jurisdictions.

Publicity stunts, power play, and information warfare in mediatized public confessions

ABSTRACT Confession has for centuries been known as the queen of evidence. This paper examines an unusual type of confessions – ones that are made in public and out of court, the main target audience of which is not legal enforcement or court officers but the generic public. Operating in the margins of law, these confessions may make legal procedures redundant. Through analysing three recent public confessions from different jurisdictions that are mediatized and spectacularized, this paper asks what these confessions communicate, what motivations states have in staging them and how such confessions may be understood in relation to the modern communication environment today. In particular, I highlight narrative inconsistencies in these confessions and consider whether they affect their communicative functions.

Negotiating language status in multilingual jurisdictions: Rhetoric and reality

Abstract About a quarter of legal jurisdictions in the world operate in more than one language. Despite this, language policies governing the functioning of law in such jurisdictions, other than in the European Union, rarely receive much attention in research. Given, however, that the policy contrast between legal monolingualism and multilingualism is often a matter of strategic response to the rising or declining power of one or more particular language communities, the conferring of legal authority on some language(s) but not others calls for analysis. Advocacy and justification surrounding potential or actual change of legal language, for example, consists of competing rhetorics advanced by politicians, legal professionals, and campaign groups, and to this extent politics permeates both the promotion and presentation of legal multilingualism, despite reluctance among legal policy makers to engage directly with this aspect of the process. This article situates legal multilingualism within a wider understanding of multilingualism and language policy. It first surveys status labels assigned to languages in multilingual jurisdictions. It then compares, across jurisdictions, rhetorical strategies deployed in promoting and opposing specific proposals about language status, in both official and public discourses, and analyses contradictions and dilemmas embedded in them. The argument extends [Rhetoric as jurisprudence: An introduction to the politics of legal language. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 4(1). 88–122] observation that legal discourse is pre-eminently a discourse of power. But if use of legal language is political, it is suggested, then the processes of negotiation which establish a language for such use are even more so.