Peter Tiersma
Biographic Data
| ID | 741052 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Tiersma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Tiersma |
| SIGNATURE | TIERSMA P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loyola Marymount University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Textualizing the law
Much of the work of lawyers consists of the production or interpretation of various sorts of legal texts. Many of these texts are authoritative or operative, in the sense that they create or modify a legal relation, institution, or state of affairs. Historically, there is a general progression from oral legal act, to an oral act with a written record, to an authoritative written text. Such authoritative texts differ from speech and other types of…
Some Myths About Legal Language
Over the centuries, much has been written about the language of the law. The language of lawyers is archaic and conservative. It is full of Latin and French. It is wordy and redundant, pompous and dull, and either highly precise or maddeningly indeterminate. Perhaps the most interesting suggestion is that legal language is itself a myth, in that it is really just ordinary language with a great deal of technical terminology. Some of these assertio…
Cops and Robbers: Selective Literalism in American Criminal Law
Police often ask people to consent to a search of their person or possessions. Many people agree to allow such searches because they interpret the officers' ostensible "requests" as indirect commands. Yet courts routinely interpret police utterances in this situation as requests. A similar issue arises in the context of custodial interrogation. People being interrogated are inclined to invoke their right to counsel in relatively indirect or tenta…
The Linguist on the Witness Stand: Forensic Linguistics in American Courts
It is becoming increasingly common for linguists to testify as expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. Often linguistic expertise is clearly helpful to the judge or jury. Based on published judicial opinions, from which we draw our data, it appears that courts have allowed linguists to testify on such issues as the probable origin of a speaker, the comprehensibility of a text, whether a particular defendant understood the Miranda warn…
Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction
Linguistic Issues in the Law
Bettyruth Walter. The jury summation as speech genre: An ethnographic study of what it means to those who use it
Dennis Kurzon. It is hereby performed… Explorations in legal speech acts
Wurdfoarried en Wurdgrammatika: In bondel leksikale stúdzjes
Rites of passage: Legal ritual in Roman law and anthropological analogues
The Language of Offer and Acceptance: Speech Acts and the Question of Intent
The Language of Offer and Acceptance: Speech Acts and the Question of IntentLanguage and law interact in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is that laws are expressed in language.Lawyers often look at language to determine the meaning of specific statutes.In such a relatively artificial context, words are chosen and interpreted with unusual care.But elsewhere, the law must interpret utterances of a more spontaneous sort, where the actual…
Frisian
The nature of phonological representation: Evidence from breaking in Frisian
A thorough examination of the nature of the phonological portion of the lexicon must address at least two crucial issues. One has traditionally been termed the abstractness controversy , which concerns itself with the issue of the level of representation, or whether lexical entries are at a surface phonetic, phonemic, systematic phonemic, or some other level. The second issue deals with the unit of representation, or whether lexical entries are i…
Local and General Markedness
The work of Jakobson—and later, of Greenberg—has developed the notion of MORPHOLOGICAL MARKEDNESS. In this view, certain morphological categories (e.g. noun singulars) are considered unmarked or more basic in relation to others (e.g. noun plurals). It is shown here that there are some principled exceptions to the general markedness conventions. One example of such LOCAL MARKEDNESS, as this type of markedness reversal will be called, is that nouns…
Recent phonological theory
Analogy. Trends in linguistics, state-of-the-art reports 10
Das Friesische: Eine sprachliche und kulturgeschichtliche Einführung
Bidirectional leveling as evidence for relational rules
The nature of f and v in Frisian and Marathi
Local and General Markedness
The work of Jakobson—and later, of Greenberg—has developed the notion of MORPHOLOGICAL MARKEDNESS. In this view, certain morphological categories (e.g. noun singulars) are considered unmarked or more basic in relation to others (e.g. noun plurals). It is shown here that there are some principled exceptions to the general markedness conventions. One example of such LOCAL MARKEDNESS, as this type of markedness reversal will be called, is that nouns…
Bidirectional leveling as evidence for relational rules
Linguistic Issues in the Law
The Linguist on the Witness Stand: Forensic Linguistics in American Courts
It is becoming increasingly common for linguists to testify as expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. Often linguistic expertise is clearly helpful to the judge or jury. Based on published judicial opinions, from which we draw our data, it appears that courts have allowed linguists to testify on such issues as the probable origin of a speaker, the comprehensibility of a text, whether a particular defendant understood the Miranda warn…
The Language of Offer and Acceptance: Speech Acts and the Question of Intent
The Language of Offer and Acceptance: Speech Acts and the Question of IntentLanguage and law interact in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is that laws are expressed in language.Lawyers often look at language to determine the meaning of specific statutes.In such a relatively artificial context, words are chosen and interpreted with unusual care.But elsewhere, the law must interpret utterances of a more spontaneous sort, where the actual…
Some Myths About Legal Language
Over the centuries, much has been written about the language of the law. The language of lawyers is archaic and conservative. It is full of Latin and French. It is wordy and redundant, pompous and dull, and either highly precise or maddeningly indeterminate. Perhaps the most interesting suggestion is that legal language is itself a myth, in that it is really just ordinary language with a great deal of technical terminology. Some of these assertio…
Cops and Robbers: Selective Literalism in American Criminal Law
Police often ask people to consent to a search of their person or possessions. Many people agree to allow such searches because they interpret the officers' ostensible "requests" as indirect commands. Yet courts routinely interpret police utterances in this situation as requests. A similar issue arises in the context of custodial interrogation. People being interrogated are inclined to invoke their right to counsel in relatively indirect or tenta…
The nature of phonological representation: Evidence from breaking in Frisian
A thorough examination of the nature of the phonological portion of the lexicon must address at least two crucial issues. One has traditionally been termed the abstractness controversy , which concerns itself with the issue of the level of representation, or whether lexical entries are at a surface phonetic, phonemic, systematic phonemic, or some other level. The second issue deals with the unit of representation, or whether lexical entries are i…
The nature of f and v in Frisian and Marathi
Bidirectional leveling as evidence for relational rules
Das Friesische: Eine sprachliche und kulturgeschichtliche Einführung
Analogy. Trends in linguistics, state-of-the-art reports 10
Recent phonological theory
Local and General Markedness
The work of Jakobson—and later, of Greenberg—has developed the notion of MORPHOLOGICAL MARKEDNESS. In this view, certain morphological categories (e.g. noun singulars) are considered unmarked or more basic in relation to others (e.g. noun plurals). It is shown here that there are some principled exceptions to the general markedness conventions. One example of such LOCAL MARKEDNESS, as this type of markedness reversal will be called, is that nouns…
Frisian
The nature of phonological representation: Evidence from breaking in Frisian
A thorough examination of the nature of the phonological portion of the lexicon must address at least two crucial issues. One has traditionally been termed the abstractness controversy , which concerns itself with the issue of the level of representation, or whether lexical entries are at a surface phonetic, phonemic, systematic phonemic, or some other level. The second issue deals with the unit of representation, or whether lexical entries are i…
The Language of Offer and Acceptance: Speech Acts and the Question of Intent
The Language of Offer and Acceptance: Speech Acts and the Question of IntentLanguage and law interact in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is that laws are expressed in language.Lawyers often look at language to determine the meaning of specific statutes.In such a relatively artificial context, words are chosen and interpreted with unusual care.But elsewhere, the law must interpret utterances of a more spontaneous sort, where the actual…
Rites of passage: Legal ritual in Roman law and anthropological analogues
Bettyruth Walter. The jury summation as speech genre: An ethnographic study of what it means to those who use it
Dennis Kurzon. It is hereby performed… Explorations in legal speech acts
Wurdfoarried en Wurdgrammatika: In bondel leksikale stúdzjes
Linguistic Issues in the Law
Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction
The Linguist on the Witness Stand: Forensic Linguistics in American Courts
It is becoming increasingly common for linguists to testify as expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. Often linguistic expertise is clearly helpful to the judge or jury. Based on published judicial opinions, from which we draw our data, it appears that courts have allowed linguists to testify on such issues as the probable origin of a speaker, the comprehensibility of a text, whether a particular defendant understood the Miranda warn…
Cops and Robbers: Selective Literalism in American Criminal Law
Police often ask people to consent to a search of their person or possessions. Many people agree to allow such searches because they interpret the officers' ostensible "requests" as indirect commands. Yet courts routinely interpret police utterances in this situation as requests. A similar issue arises in the context of custodial interrogation. People being interrogated are inclined to invoke their right to counsel in relatively indirect or tenta…
Some Myths About Legal Language
Over the centuries, much has been written about the language of the law. The language of lawyers is archaic and conservative. It is full of Latin and French. It is wordy and redundant, pompous and dull, and either highly precise or maddeningly indeterminate. Perhaps the most interesting suggestion is that legal language is itself a myth, in that it is really just ordinary language with a great deal of technical terminology. Some of these assertio…
Textualizing the law
Much of the work of lawyers consists of the production or interpretation of various sorts of legal texts. Many of these texts are authoritative or operative, in the sense that they create or modify a legal relation, institution, or state of affairs. Historically, there is a general progression from oral legal act, to an oral act with a written record, to an authoritative written text. Such authoritative texts differ from speech and other types of…
Philosophy (15 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Law in Society and Culture (5 works)