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This paper consists of a short analysis of the sources and the treatment of the legal lexicon in the first dictionary published by the Spanish Royal Academy (1726–1739), followed by a longer commentary on the representation and the treatment of the concept of judge, in which the reflection of the extralinguistic factors in the definitions stands in focus. The results highlight the relevance of the legal context of that era for the treatment of the lexicon related to the legal domain, but they also demonstrate the pattern in which the lexicographic data displays peculiarities of legal matters.
This paper presents a study on the comprehensibility of rephrased syntactic structures in German court decisions. While there are a number of studies using psycholinguistic methods to investigate the comprehensibility of original legal texts, we are not aware of any study looking into the effect resolving complex structures has on the comprehensibility. Our study combines three methodological steps. First, we analyse an annotated corpus of court decisions, press releases and newspaper reports on these decisions in order to detect those complex structures in the decisions which distinguish them from the other text types. Secondly, these structures are rephrased into two increasingly simple versions. Finally, all versions are subjected to a self paced reading experiment. The findings suggest that rephrasing greatly enhances the comprehensibility for the lay reader.