Miklós Szabó

The paper sets out to offer an alternative to the function/argument approach to the most essential aspects of natural language meanings. That is, we question the assumption that semantic completeness (of, e.g., propositions) or incompleteness (of, e.g., predicates) exactly replicate the corresponding grammatical concepts (of, e.g., sentences and verbs, respectively). We argue that even if one gives up this assumption, it is still possible to keep the compositionality of the semantic interpretation of simple predicate/argument structures. In our opinion, compositionality presupposes that we are able to compare arbitrary meanings in term of information content. This is why our proposal relies on an ‘intrinsically’ type free algebraic semantic theory. The basic entities in our models are neither individuals, nor eventualities, nor their properties, but ‘pieces of evidence’ for believing in the ‘truth’ or ‘existence’ or ‘identity’ of any kind of phenomenon. Our formal language contains a single binary non-associative constructor used for creating structured complex terms representing arbitrary phenomena. We give a finite Hilbert-style axiomatisation and a decision algorithm for the entailment problem of the suggested system.

Having been invited by editor-in-chief, Professor Anne Wagner, to edit the present special issue, we decided to fulfil a longstanding wish to provide a panorama about the Hungarian Language and Law. Along with other ‘law and …’ movements, Law and Language has attracted a great deal of attention from subsequent generations of Hungarian academic lawyers, because the political transition served as a wonderful subject and context for scholarly papers and text books, for examining the putative or real influence of this or that popular social scientist or for undertaking literature overviews. Unfortunately, there have been relatively few academic papers that have sought to draw general conclusions from empirically well-founded case studies. In order to fill that important gap, this special issue has taken the opportunity to select only those interdisciplinary papers whose goals include an analysis of Hungarian legal discourse written from a critical angle and using critical empirical methodology. At the very outset of the editing process—back in 2018—for the purposes of this special issue we defined as ‘empirical’ any sufficiently coherent fact-based research that reflects the language of legal discourse. And ‘critical’ means an engagement with the values of the Rule of Law. This double methodological and axiological feature is manifest throughout the selected papers classified as ‘law and language’.