A Critical Systemic Functional Analysis of the Communication Difficulties with Information Packing in Criminal Procedure Code of Iran

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Author
M. Hatefi
Assistant Professor at Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
Difficulties of the legal language is something that everyone has heard something about that and may have ideas about the problem. It is being said that the way to solve the problem with the legal language is that we try to write the articles of the codes in an easy language and method and to use editing instruments. From a linguistic point of view it is not just the matter of easy writing but it is a problem which needs some basic theoretical hypothesis to show us a scientific method to deal with the problem. In this study, subject matter analysis is done through the functional approach as proposed and outlined in Halliday’s approach. The author believes that it is not enough to consider the linguistic character of the articles of the legal codes or the texts of law, but we needs to consider instead the communicative aspects and the way the legislator convey the massage.

This paper aims to study how the Criminal Procedure Code of Iran to convey meaning and to communicate and transfer message to the audience based on Halliday’s functionalism regarding communicative and functional roles of language. Based on that approach, the Code is expected to communicate with the audience and convey meaning and message through a variety of linguistic functions. Each article in the code contains a variety of actions and topics which the legislator tries to convey to the audience using linguistic and metalinguistic factors. In this paper an attempt is made to represent the three experimental, interpersonal and textual metafunctions in the articles of the Code.

Legal mechanisms, expressed through language propositions, are subordinate to the contextual and structural requirements of language for meaning. Functional theory defines three metafunctions as contextual and structural requirements for expressing any linguistic contents. To consider the empirical-logical, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions is necessary to analyze the difficulties of the legal language in general and the language of the law in special. The key question is: what is this difficulty? The functional hypothesis is that this difficulty lies in the way information is presented by the text and in the way the text to communicate. By focusing on Articles 1 to 7 of the Criminal Procedure Code of 2013, The present paper showed that in these articles, passive structure of the verb, substitution of the subject with the abstract expressions and conversion of concrete verbs to ideational create a huge amount of interpretation imposed on the reader. It has implicated the role of judicial authorities in the exercise of power in the form of constructive and empirical and material constituent elements in cases where they must be held accountable. This form of information gives a dominant position to the judicial authorities against the accused in contrast with the protection of civil rights enshrined in Article 7.

Findings confirmed the desirable performance of the functional theory in the field of the articles of the Code. Halliday’s Functionalism shows that the main problem in respect with the articles of the Criminal Procedure Code is not just restricted to the linguistic features but the main problem arises from the communicative strategies which the legislator uses to convey meaning to the audience. In this way the interpretive implications have the most parasitic role which do not let the audience easily communicate and direct with the message being conveyed. The results of this study showed that a proper packaging of Information, regarding the functional aspects, is a useful way to achieve the goals of an easy writing movements too. Proper packaging of information, will help us resolve the difficulties in both sides of writing and communicating.

Keywords

Subjects

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Language Related Research
Volume 11, Issue 4 - Serial Number 58
September and October 2020
Pages 129-152