ABSTRACT
A great deal has been written over the years on the subject of legal language, by experts in law, experts in language, and experts in neither. Relatively little, however, has been written about statutes as complete and unified communications. This chapter plugs that gap and is concerned with identifying the properties of one kind of statute, the criminal statute, as a complete and unified communication, i.e. as a discourse, a stretch of language felt to be complete in itself. It concerns the unusual relationship of the reader to the criminal statute. The chapter is also concerned with the discourse properties of the criminal statute. Assumptions are being made here about written discourses which are questionable when applied to the criminal statute. The relationship between statements need not be between the particular statement in the courtroom and the general statement in the criminal statute alone.
