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Tarja Salmi-Tolonen, "The Linguistic Manifestations of Primary and Secondary Functions of Law in the National And Supranational Contexts", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Vol.VII no.19 [1994], 19-39: It is the close interaction between language of the law and society that makes law language particularly interesting as an object of study. English, perhaps for the first time in our era, is now a co-equal at the European Community and other supranational organisations. This closer contact with other languages probably means that English is, though perhaps to a lesser extent than some of the other languages involved, undergoing some changes. Whether these changes are already visible at some level in a restricted sublanguage, legal language, is my primary interest here. This paper reports on an attempt to see how the primary and secondary functions of law manifest themselves through language (English in this case) in two different contexts: the cooperative and harmonizing (the European Communities/European Union) and the directive and rights conferring (the national). By the primary functions of law I mean power conferring and duty imposing rules (Hart 1961) and by the secondary: conditional, purposive/final and procedural (Willke 1985). The national law corpus studied consists of two Parliamentary Acts and the EEC corpus basically primary law texts. The texts have been chosen from the domain of social policy, equality, in particular. A study of limited corpora can only show tendencies, even at its best. However, the study shows that there is a difference in the variety of linguistic means used for expressing the primary and secondary functions of law in the two corpora. Author's address: University of Tampere, Department of Translation Studies, P.O. Box 607, SF-33100 Tampere, Finland; email: trtasa@uta.fi

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