The long arm of the legal metaphor: pragmatics and legal discourse

In recent years there has been widespread interest, across the social sciences, in the role of language, so that discourse analysis is no longer the exclusive terrain of linguists but is practised in fields like Sociology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Geography, etc., and this phenomenon is even found in hard sciences such as Maths, Physics and Chemistry. The trend is partly explained by the increased sophistication of teaching methodologies in modern times, but it is not confined to questions of classroom communication or the dissemination of research. Rather, there is a growing sense that to study Economics, for example, means to imbibe a way of looking at the world, of representing things and talking about them, which is unique to the subject. The lexis of Economics contains mysterious terms for the uninitiated – economies of scale, marginal utility, satisficing, scarcity, supply and demand – each of which needs to be unpacked and absorbed before the student can acquire the mindset of the economist. Many of these terms, moreover, have been bones of contention among conflicting schools. To really master the ‘discourse’ of Economics is to have a clear picture of how the theoretical debate has clarified the issues for which these terms are verbal proxies, how thinkers have used these tokens to develop their arguments, many of which will still be contested today (Salvi and Incelli 1999).