The Positioning of If-clause in Legal Provisions of CISG and Its Semantic Iconicity

DOI

10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.236How to use a DOI?

Keywords

if-clause; legal norm; semantic iconicity; syntax

Abstract

Semantic iconicity indicates that syntactic structure reflects the empirical structure in some ways. This has been widely observed and proved to be true in ordinary language phenomenon. For if-clause, because condition is essential for result, if-clause generally is positioned prior to its main clause. But legal provision is different from ordinary language. The 129 if-clauses in United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods show that, if the main clauses involve authoritative norm, prohibitive norm, mandatory norm and definition norm, the main clauses will be the starting point of the clause. The special positioning of if-clause can be well explained by semantic iconicity for all the emphases of law are nothing but rights and obligations as well as legal certainty. Thus, different from general iconicity, if-clauses have to be positioned after the main clause when rights, obligations and legal certainty are concerned.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wenjun Wang
PY  - 2019/07
DA  - 2019/07
TI  - The Positioning of If-clause in Legal Provisions of CISG and Its Semantic Iconicity
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1056
EP  - 1059
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.236
DO  - 10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.236
ID  - Wang2019/07
ER  -