The changes taking place today in Russian legislation, with all its new
subtleties, raise the issue of making legal language comprehensible
to the ordinary citizen. Dealing with this question largely depends on
improvements in juridical procedures and making use of the best possible
linguistic resources. At the same time, there are some areas of legislation
where typically, on the one hand, there are profound changes
in the laws themselves while on the other hand, they are governed by
their relationship to this law. These areas include that of intellectual
property rights, which are codified in the Russian Federation’s Civil
Code, Chapter IV. The wording used in the chapter in question was used
as material for discussion regarding the clarity and comprehensibility
of legal texts. It was found that, in its legal formulations, this document
uses an excessive amount of new and borrowed terms, approximate and
ethical concepts, nominalizations and complex syntactic structures,
thus making it more difficult to make sense of the legislation.
In overcoming comprehension difficulties regarding new legislation
a key role is played by the practical commentary which accompanies
the law. Acting as a kind of text-broker, this commentary interprets
and clarifies the law, thereby fostering the successful understanding
of legal rights throughout the whole population. The commentary
examined in the current study offers guidelines regarding recommendations
for the application of provisions pursuant to Part IV of
the Russian Federation Civil Code, issued by the Russian Federation
Chamber of Commerce and Industry. This text is of linguistic interest
in terms of its structure, core content and discourse techniques which
aim to ensure that anything that cannot be understood by the layman is “filtered out”. The methods adopted in the comparative analysis of
the legal–normative text and the commentary were those employed
in other works analysing the reformulation of acts in different forms
and types of communication. The unit of analysis adopted was the
minimum commentary unit – the main component of any commentary
text. In the Guidelines the size of the unit may vary, extending over one
or more sentences or even paragraphs. It is made up of various combinations
of the following components: a reference to a commented-on
text, a direct quote from a legal text, a reformulated norm (with or
without indication) and the actual commentary itself, as well as metacommunicative
devices accompanying other components of the unit
which is being commented on. This article offers an analysis of some
of the most productive types of reformulating techniques found in the
Guidelines. These are principally: exemplification, renaming, syntactic
simplification and rearrangement, enumeration and precision.
