ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two extracts. First extract works through John Searle's speech act categories, pointing out legal connections and implications. Searle distinguishes between speech acts whose illocutionary force or point is strong, such as testifying, and those whose illocutionary point is weak, such as asserting, and stating. Second extract focuses on the linguistic properties of generality and 'displacement'. The extract relates these fundamental capabilities of language to the difference between commands and legal rules. Second extract comes from Frederick Schauer's editorial introduction to a collection of republished articles on language and law that had become difficult to get hold of. Language is many things, but one of them is that it is general, having rules that are neither speaker- nor situation-specific. In much the same way, law as an institution differs from other forms of social interaction largely because of its generality. Language shorn of many of the normal conversational and contextual embellishments ordinarily discussed under the heading of pragmatics.
