Analytical study of determiners and pronouns in international law as represented by UN human rights treaties in 2006

Abstract EN

The language of law has distinct grammatical features that make it different from the other varieties of language.

This paper examines two of the function word classes that can be compared according to their function: determiners and pronouns.

The corpus used for analysis is an instance of public international law.

It is the recent UN human rights treaties of the 2000s, which are Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006 and International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (CPED) in 2006.

The analysis uses Biber et al.‟s Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) as a framework for the qualitative and functional analyses, and corpus linguistics for the quantitative analysis.

The results generally reveal and confirm that the language of law is formal, impersonal, and gender-neutral.

In addition, it seeks precision and clarity.