Sandra Hansen, Ralph Dirksen, Martin Küchler,

Kerstin Kunz, Stella Neumann*

## Comprehensible legal texts - utopia or a question of wording?

## On processing rephrased German court decisions

## Abstract

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 fi  ndings suggest that rephrasing greatly enhances the comprehensibility for the lay reader.

## 1. Introduction

In the course of the last thirty years we have seen many contributions to the question of how to make the legal language more comprehensible. In the Anglophone world the plain language movement is quite infl  uential,  in  Germanic  research  -  on  which  we  will  mainly  concen  trate here since we are concerned with the German language - the work of the interdisciplinary working group 'Analyse der Juristischen Sprache' (cf.  Rave  et  al.  1971)  from  the  beginning  of  the  1970s  on  wards  has

* The authors would like to thank the reviewer for valuable comments on the paper. Of course, he cannot be held responsible for any remaining weaknesses.

* Sandra Hansen, Ralph Dirksen, Martin Küchler, Kerstin Kunz, Stella Neumann Universität des Saarlandes FR 4.6

Universitätscampus Saarbrücken A2 2

D-66123 Saarbrücken

15

to  be  mentioned and most recently the working group at the BerlinBrandenburgische  Akademie  der  Wissenschaften  (cf.  Lerch  2004a). Lex  i  cal  and  syntactic  specifi  cities  of  legal  language  are  described such as nominal style, longer than average sentences which are said to  contribute  to  the  incomprehensibility  of  the  language  of  law  (cf. Wagner 1981, Oksaar 1988). In this paper we concentrate on the language of court decisions whose linguistic characteristics are de  scribed in  an  example-based way by Altehenger (1983), contrasting German and Danish decisions by Engberg (1997) and using corpus-linguistic meth  ods by Hansen-Schirra & Neumann (2004). This latter study confi  rms the specifi  cities of longer sentences, nominalisations and highly complex noun phrases. These syntactic elements previously only described on an exemplary basis were analysed in a quantitative way in com  pa  rison to a reference corpus consisting of samples from 15 text types.

Building  on  work  like  this,  several  studies  investigated  legal  language  with  the  help  of  methods  for  researching  comprehensibility. Basedow (1999) reports on a word-based study using the Flesch-test (Flesch 1948). This readability formula developed in the 1940s allows quantifying  criteria  like  word  and  sentence  length.  Nevertheless,  the read  ability approach is problematic because it is limited to counting syllables and words per sentence and completely ignores the semantic content of the text (a short sentence may still be diffi  cult to understand because it consists of short, but rare words). In the framework of research on comprehensibility it is therefore regarded as obsolete (cf. Rickheit 1995; see also Lerch 2004b for a review of the readability approach for measuring the comprehensibility of the law).

The above mentioned working group 'Language and Law' at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften did a psycholin  guistic experiment aiming at the investigation of the general knowledge background of the participant. The complex research design used various methods like Thinking Aloud Protocols to look into the transparency rule in the German legislation on standard terms and conditions. It investigated deeper coherence structures in standard terms and conditions of insurance contracts. Unfortunately, the results of this highly interesting study are not published yet. Therefore it is not possible to draw any consequences from the fi  ndings.

Neumann & Hansen-Schirra (2004) used an acceptability judgment experiment (Gernsbacher 1994) in a pilot study to test the comprehensibility of syntactic peculiarities in German court decisions. The German verb mood Konjunktiv 1 was chosen as a register-specifi  c feature of court decisions as described by Altehenger (1983). This pilot study showed the use of the combination of corpus-linguistic methods establishing the grammatical characteristics of a given register with psycholin  guistic experiments testing the comprehensibility of the specifi  c features. The described results served as a basis for the research discussed in the present paper.

So far, we have discussed legal language as such. However, this is a cover term which has to be specifi  ed for our purposes. We have to distin  guish between at least legislative texts, administrative texts and court decisions. These text types differ in view of the authors, the addressees as well as the function of the texts. Jaspersen (1998) discusses the com  prehensibility of legislative texts. There are a number of linguistic guidebooks for German administrations (cf. 'Bürgernahe Ver  wal  tungssprache'  by  the  Bundesverwaltungsamt 2   and  publications  re  sult  ing from  the  project  'Bürgerfreundliche  Verwaltungs  sprache" 3 ).  Fur  thermore, Grönert (2004) reports on research geared towards improv  ing the com  muni  cation between administrations and citizens.

Court decisions are written by jurists and are not addressed at a clearly identifi  able recipient but - apart from the parties involved in the case - rather at unspecifi  c recipients subdivided into two groups. Court decisions are addressed both at legal experts who work with the texts and at the lay citizen who is supposed to accept the decision and abide by it. The needs of the two recipient groups partly diverge: Experts expect to be supplied with concise and precise information effi  ciently packed into typical terms and syntactic constructions. On the other side, the lacking specialised knowledge of citizens not legally trained requires a more elaborate - in the view of the expert probably lengthy - presentation of informa  tion. As this type of legal texts particularly draws public atten  tion (cf.  Jaspersen 1998) it should be com  prehensible to a large group of recipients, i.e. both, experts and citizens. For this reason, our main interest lies in investigating the comprehensibility of court decisions by tracking down their linguistic complexity.

1 We intentionally use the German term for the subjunctive mood to make the functional difference to the English subjunctive clear.

3 http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/vt/

2 http://www.bva.bund.de/imperia/md/content/bbb\_win/allgemeines/149.pdf

Our  study  focuses  on  how  readers  process  syntactic  specifi  cities found to be typical of German court decisions. The aim of the study is to quantify syntactic specifi  cities of German court decisions, to rephrase the complex structures into simplifi  ed versions and fi  nally to test these  version  psycholingu  istically.  Consequently,  the  research  setup com  bines  corpus-linguistic  and  psycholinguistic  methods  against  the back  ground of legal knowledge. This interdisciplinary research design is refl  ected in the authors' affi  liations with not only linguistics but also law and psychology.

The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. In the following section 2, we will present the design of the study with the preparatory steps for the psycholinguistic test, namely the corpus-linguistic analysis of the texts as well as the process of rephrasing three types of syntactic specifi  cities conforming to the legal content of the original wording. In section 3, we will present the psycholinguistic experiment in detail and discuss the results. Finally, we draw conclusions from this study and look at consequences for future research in section 4.

## 2. The study

## 2.1. Corpus-based analysis

## Corpus design

As mentioned above, the fi  rst step to analysing the syntactic complexity of German legalese consists in a corpus-linguistic analysis. We intend to identify and quantify the syntactic features causing this complexity. For  this  purpose,  we  compare  intralingual  versions  of  German  legal texts.  Hence, our corpus of investigation consists of decisions of the German Federal Constitutional Court and press releases and newspaper reports on these decisions. One main interest for looking into the three versions resides in the assumption that, serving different purposes, they may display different linguistic properties, in particular, that they vary in their syntactic complexity: We assume the decisions to be the most complex version as they contain language for specifi  c purposes. They con  stitute a written version of the oral pronouncement in court. They display  a  complexity  of  legal  content  in  combination  with  lin  guistic complexity that may manifest on every linguistic level.

The newspaper reports are assumed to be the version displaying the least complex syntactic structures. They are expected to exhibit more general language features as they are designed to be the citizen's everyday reading. Further on, we expect the press releases to be of medium linguistic complexity as this version may be infl  uenced by both, court decisions and newspaper reports: On the one hand, as they were written by legal experts, the press releases may contain specifi  c features of German legalese. On the other hand, as they are considered to be rephrased variants of the court decisions for specialised journalists they may show general language features of newspaper texts.

## Research design

Complex grammatical structures are major indicators of the linguistic complexity of texts. Therefore, we focus on the empirical analysis of the syntactic properties of the above mentioned intralingual versions of German legal texts. We apply a range of corpus-linguistic methods to verify and intensify the hypothesis about properties of legal and/or administrative texts stated in example-based studies (cf. Wagner 1981 for administrative texts and Altehenger 1983 for court decisions).

We intend to gain quantitative results about the syntactic properties respons  ible  for  the  varying  degrees  of  complexity  in  the  three  intralingual  versions.  In  addition,  the  annotation  results  are  supposed  to refl  ect which features on which syntactic level are unique to the court decisions and which features are modifi  ed or deleted in the press releases and newspaper reports respectively. We interpret syntactic complexity by investigating the following features:

- -Sentence length
- -Embedding in sentences
- -Length of noun phrases and prepositional phrases
- -Embedding of noun phrases and prepositional phrases
- -Nominalisations

For the purpose of obtaining more information about the syntactic complexity on sentence and phrase level, we use the notion of fi  eld topology which was especially developed for investigating the structure of the German sentence. It constitutes a relatively theory-neutral description of German syntax and considers its fl  exible constituent structure. The German sentence is split up into smaller parts with regard to the distribu  tional properties of the verb complex - so called topological fi  elds: 'Vorfeld', 'linke Satzklammer' (fi  nite part of the verb complex), 'Mittelfeld', 'rechte Satzklammer' (non- fi  nite part of the verb complex) and 'Nachfeld'.

We combine automatic parsing and fi  ne-grained manual annotation to get detailed information about the linguistic complexity on the syn  tactic levels of the three versions. We analyse sentences from the three corpora using a topological parser (Braun 1999). It is based on the notion of fi  eld  topology for German syntax as mentioned above. The parser struc  tures the sentence into a series of neighbouring and embedded topolo  gical fi  elds. The noun phrases and prepositional phrases are analysed man  ually using an XML editor. For practical reasons, only the 'Vorfeld' is annotated: The 'Vorfeld' constitutes the leftmost part of the German sen  tence, in front of the fi  nite verb, and is expected to contain mainly noun and prepositional phrases. Furthermore, we annotate only phrases which  have  a  minimum  length  of  seven  tokens  (newspaper  reports) or ten tokens (decisions and press releases) as we expect that phrases of  this  length  already  have  a  certain  complexity.  Both  the  automatic output of the parser and the output of the manual annotation are doublechecked by the annotators.

We query nominalisations with the help of a concordance tool which displays  all  matching  constructions.  We  count  all  tokens  which  are classifi  ed  as  nouns  by  a  part-of-speech tagger and which contain the suffi  xes  "-ung",  "-ion",  "-ismus",  "-heit",  "-keit",  "-ität",  "-schaft"  as well as the respective plural forms.

## Findings

In the following, we present some of the results of our corpus-linguistic analysis before we move on to a general interpretation. We start by looking into the syntactic complexity on sentence level.

Table 1: Complexity on sentence level

|                                         | Decisions   | Press releases   | Newspaper reports   |
|-----------------------------------------|-------------|------------------|---------------------|
| Av. sentence length in token            | 24.32       | 20.31            | 14.89               |
| No. of subordinate clauses per sentence | 0.57        | 0.50             | 0.34                |
| Embedding                               |             |                  |                     |
| Level 0                                 | 56.77%      | 62.78%           | 68.33%              |
| Level 1                                 | 34.11%      | 29.42%           | 28.47%              |
| Level 2                                 | 7.90%       | 6.58%            | 3.20%               |
| Level 3                                 | 1.13%       | 1.22%            | 0.00%               |
| Level 4                                 | 0.08%       | 0.00%            | 0.00%               |

Table 1 displays the annotation results concerning the complexity of the sentence in the court decisions, press releases and newspaper reports, respectively. Considering the average number of tokens per sentence in the three subcorpora we fi  nd longer sentences in the court decisions than in the press releases. The newspaper reports by far have the shortest sentences. In addition, more than every second sentence in the decisions also contains a subordinate clause, whereas in the press releases every second, and in the newspaper reports every third sentence contains a subordinate clause. The higher number of subordinate clauses in the court  decisions  indicates  that  the  sentences  contain  more  embedding than the press releases, and even far more embedded clauses than the newspaper reports. This tendency can be confi  rmed when looking at the percentage of embedded clauses on the respective levels of embedding. The lower percentage of clauses on Level 0 in the court decisions tells us that there are more clauses to be found on deeper levels of embedding. In most instances, the percentage of embedded subordinate clauses on deeper levels is higher in the court decisions than in the press releases, and the newspaper reports clearly contain less embedded clauses on the deeper levels. Generally speaking, the fi  ndings from our analysis of the sentences refl  ect an extreme syntactic complexity to be found in the court decisions. The newspaper reports show a tendency towards much simpler sentence constructions, whereas the press releases are of medium complexity on sentence levels. We can conclude that extreme syntactic complexity on sentence level is one prominent feature of court decisions, especially compared to newspaper reports.

We now consider the syntactic complexity on phrase level. Table 2 dis  plays the annotation results for the complexity of the phrases in the court decisions, press releases and newspaper reports, respectively.

Table 2: Complexity on phrase level

|                             | Decisions   | Press releases   | Newspaper reports   |
|-----------------------------|-------------|------------------|---------------------|
| Max. phrase length in token | 62          | 52               | 27                  |
| Av. phrase length in token  | 5.80        | 4.69             | 3.71                |
| Embedding                   |             |                  |                     |
| Level 0                     | 29.70%      | 24.92%           | 48.51%              |
| Level 1                     | 36.11%      | 42.25%           | 39.55%              |
| Level 2                     | 25.21%      | 22.49%           | 10.45%              |
| Level 3                     | 6.62%       | 7.60%            | 1.49%               |
| Level 4                     | 2.14%       | 2.74%            | 0.00%               |
| Level 5                     | 0.21%       | 0.00%            | 0.00%               |

Comparing the length of phrases in the three intralingual versions as shown  in  Table  2,  we  see  that  the  court  decisions  have  the  longest phrases and that the newspaper reports have the shortest phrases. The aver  age phrase length in the press releases lies between the other two ver  sions.

In order to obtain the depth of embedding, we count all head nouns on the respective levels of embed  ding. The results for the newspaper re  ports correspond to our expectations: Most of the noun phrases and pre  po  sitional phrases appear on level 0. On level 1 the percentage of em  bed  ded phrases is much higher than on level 2 and level 3. Apart from  that,  they  contain  only  four  levels  of  embedding,  whereas  the press releases have fi  ve levels and the court decisions even six levels of embedding. Comparing the press releases and the court decisions, two peculiarities have to be noted: First, the percentage of phrases on level 0 in the press releases is lower than in the court decisions. Second, on level 1, the percentage of embedded phrases is higher in the press re  leases  than  in  the  decisions  and  the  difference from level 0 to 1 is even bigger than in the decisions. This may be due to terminology and para  graphs in the court decisions being explained in the press releases by using embedded phrases. Apart from that, the higher percentage of phrases on level two in the decisions and press releases may be caused by  coordinations  within  phrases.  This  tendency  towards  organising phrases in extremely compact structures may result from the need to pre  sent the information in a concise way: Explanations and further informa  tion on the court decisions may be packed into phrases rather than being realised by verbal constructions which would require more space. It thus leads to a high nominal density.

Finally, the amount of nominalisations as deverbal derivations to be found in each intralingual version is also an indicator for more or less syntactic complexity.

Table 3: amount of nominalisations

|                       | Decisions   | Press releases   | Newspaper reports   |
|-----------------------|-------------|------------------|---------------------|
| All nominalisations   | 7.15%       | 7.30%            | 4.54%               |
| 'ung'-nominalisations | 5.31%       | 5.56%            | 3.30%               |

Table 3 shows that 7.15 % of all nouns in the court decisions are no  mina  lisations. The percentage of nominalisations in the press releases is even higher (7.30 %). This higher proportion of nominalisations may also be an indicator of the above described tendency to compress information: press releases have to inform the recipient in a very con  dens  ed way. The newspaper reports exhibit a much lower amount of nomi  nalisations (4.54 %) than the two other intralingual versions.

Our data clearly show that derivations on "-ung" are the most frequent  German  nominalisations  in  all  three  intralingual  versions.  For this reason, we concentrate on these forms when elaborating rephrased ver  sions of nominalisations as will be explained in section 2.2.

Summarising  our  fi  ndings,  we  can  say  that  the  annotation  results mostly confi  rm our hypotheses concerning the syntactic complexity of German legal texts. Comparing the court decisions, press releases and newspaper reports the following important tendencies have to be outlined:

- -The court decisions display more complexity on most syntactic levels than the press releases and the reports: They have the longest sen  tences, they contain the highest number of subordinate clauses and the highest depth of embedding. They also contain the longest noun phrases and prepositional phrases. Furthermore, on most lev-

els, the decisions show more embedded phrases than the press releases and the newspaper reports and they contain a high number of nominalisations. We assume that this high complexity on all syntac  tic levels has a negative effect on the comprehensibility of the court  decisions.  It  complicates  processing  and  risks  destructing the recipient's capacity of storing information in the short term memory.

- -The press releases' complexity lies between that of the court decisions and the newspaper reports. In some cases, they approximate the court decisions or are even more complex: They contain more embedded noun phrases on level two and have slightly more nomi  nali  sations  than  the  court  decisions.  These  factors  indi  cate  a tendency to informational density similar to that in the court de  cisions: Information is packed into heavy noun phrases and no  mi  nalisations rather than being distributed onto larger gram  ma  tic  al units like sentences. Therefore, we assume that the syntac  tic struc  tures in the press releases, on most levels, are still too complex for lay per  sons. And this complexity still affects the reception process. For this reason, the press releases cannot be used as a starting point to resolve the complexity of the court decisions.
- -The newspaper reports are less complex than the court decisions, and are still clearly less complex than the press releases on all investigated syntactic levels. As stated in our assump  tions above, they mostly contain general language features with which lay persons as readers are  confronted every day. We assume that the newspaper reports are much easier to process than the two other intralingual versions. There  fore, they can serve as a yardstick for elabo  rating methods to rephrase the court decisions, as will be explained in the following section.

## 2.2.  Rephrasing register-specifi  c syntactic constructions

For  the  rephrases,  it  is  necessary  to  restrict  the  number  of  syntactic fea  tures  as  well as the number of versions to be elaborated. We thus con  centrate  on  the  three  syntactic  features  of  deeply  embedded  sentences (abbreviated 'S'), deeply embedded phrases ('P') and '-ung'nominalisations ('N'). With a view to the feasibility of the psycho  lingui  stic experiment, we restrict ourselves to two rephrases (versions B

and C) of the original version A retrieved from the corpus of court decisions. Our goal is to work out three degrees of complexity: a highly complex version A, a medium complex version B and a simple version C. All versions have to have the same legal contents. This is guaranteed by the interdisciplinary team consisting of both jurists and linguists.

Facing the highly complex structures of the court decisions, the question arises how to delimit the rephrased versions. The medium complex version follows the idea of an optimal approach to comprehensibility as proposed by Groeben & Christmann (1989). This approach claims that texts which conform to the reader's expectations - for instance by means of maximally simple structures (see below) - do not offer any cognitive  stimulus  to  the  reader.  Extremely  simplifi  ed  texts  are  said to destruct the recipient's motivation to keep reading (cf. Groeben & Christmann 1989:175). We apply this optimal approach to comprehensibility to the medium version by taking the corpus results of the newspaper reports as a benchmark. As previously mentioned, we assume that newspapers use a range of language well adapted to the reading habits of the lay reader 4  - or, to put it the other way round - newspapers form their reading habits. Thus, structures typical for newspaper reports should be familiar to lay readers of court decisions and still challenge them enough to pay attention to the unfolding text.

The simple version C realises a maximum strategy: the complex sentence, for instance, is broken down to one clause per sentence. This corresponds to the maximum approach to comprehensibility as advocated by Langer et al. (1974). They report on a study in which experts score texts in view of the four dimensions 'linguistic simplicity', 'structureorganisation', 'brevity-shortness' and 'interest-liveliness'. They argue that the higher a text is scored with respect to these dimensions the better the text will be memorised. We apply their dimension of simplicity to the three syntactic features under investigation in our study.

## The rephrased syntactic dimensions in detail

As shown in the corpus analysis, the authors of court decisions make use of more complex and embedded sentence structures than the au- thors  of  the  other  text  types  in  the  corpus.  Initially,  those  structures were  rephrased  which  displayed  the  highest  level  of  embedding  on the sentence level. They turned out to be rather exceptional examples with  non-representative  peculiarities,  so  we  broadened  the  scope  for extract  ing sentences from the corpus to slightly less striking examples. Example 1 shows the rephrasing process for the syntactic dimension S, with 1a showing the original sentence (version A), 1b the medium version B and 1c the maximum version C:

4 Particularly those readers participating in our psycholinguistic experiment, see section  3

- 1a Paragraph  1626  BGB  ist  mit  Artikel  6  Grundgesetz  insoweit  nicht verein  bar, als eine Übergangsregelung fehlt, die eine gerichtliche Einzel  fallprüfung, ob das Wohl des Kindes einer gemeinsamen elterlichen Sorge der nicht miteinander verheirateten Eltern entgegensteht, für die Fälle vorsieht, in denen die Eltern mit dem Kind zusammengelebt, sich  aber  noch  vor  In-Kraft-Treten  des  Kindschaftsrechtsreformgesetzes am 1. Juli 1998 getrennt haben.
- 1b Paragraph  1626  BGB  ist  mit  Artikel  6  Grundgesetz  insoweit  nicht verein  bar, als eine Übergangsregelung fehlt. Diese müsste eine gerichtliche Einzelfallprüfung für die Fälle vorsehen, in denen die Eltern mit dem Kind zusammengelebt haben, sich aber vor dem Inkrafttreten des Kindschaftsrechtsreformgesetzes am 1. Juli 1998 getrennt ha  ben. In diesem Fall wäre zu prüfen, ob das Wohl des Kindes einer gemeinsa  men  elterlichen  Sorge  der  nicht  miteinander  verheirateten  Eltern entge  gensteht.
- 1c Paragraph 1626 BGB ist mit Artikel 6 Grundgesetz in einem Punkt nicht vereinbar: Eine Übergangsregelung fehlt. Diese müsste eine gerichtliche  Einzelfallprüfung  unter  zwei  Bedingungen  vorsehen.  Erstens müss  ten  die  Eltern  mit  dem  Kind  zusammengelebt  haben.  Zweitens müssten diese sich vor dem Inkrafttreten des Kindschaftsrechtsreformgesetzes am 1. Juli 1998 getrennt haben. In diesem Fall könnte das Wohl des Kindes einer gemeinsamen elterlichen Sorge der nicht miteinander verheirateten Eltern entgegenstehen.

As this example already shows, the logical relation within the sen  tence poses a problem for the rephrasing process. Transferring the intrasenten  tial logical relation to a sequence of logically related sentences may in  volve  major  restructuring,  because  sentence  splitting  can  lead  to ambiguous intersentential reference and to a loss of textual coherence. In Example 1 restructuring is realised by postponing the clause containing the postmodifi  cation of 'Einzelfallprüfung' to the end of the newly created sequence and adding an introductory anaphoric prepositional phrase.

Embedding on the phrase level is resolved fi  rst by transferring a nominal structure into a verbal structure. This is typically realised by expressing the nominal meaning in a subordinate clause with the formerly only nominal meaning distributed on nominal and verbal elements. For our rephrasing process this means that version B is more complex on the sentence level than version A. Therefore, the second re  phrase leading to version C consists in a break up of the complex sentence structure as for the embedded sentences (see above). Example 2 below illustrates syntactic dimension P.

- 2a Im  vorliegenden  Fall  braucht  auf  die  Erfolgsaussichten  einer  noch einzulegenden Verfassungsbeschwerde gegen das angegriffene Gesetz nicht eingegangen zu werden, weil jedenfalls die Folgenabwägung zu Lasten der Antragsteller ausfällt.
- 2b Im vorliegenden Fall braucht nicht darauf eingegangen zu werden, welche  Erfolgsaussichten  eine  Verfassungsbe  schwerde  gegen  das angegriffene  Gesetz  haben  würde,  die  noch  einzulegen  wäre,  weil jedenfalls die Folgenab  wägung zu Lasten der Antragsteller ausfällt.
- 2c Im vorliegenden Fall braucht nicht darauf eingegangen zu werden, welche  Erfolgsaussichten  eine  Verfassungs  beschwerde  gegen  das angegriffene  Gesetz  haben  würde.  Diese  wäre  noch  einzulegen. Jedenfalls fällt die Folgenabwägung zu Lasten der Antragsteller aus.

With respect  to  nominalisations,  we  concentrate  on  deverbal  derivations with the suffi  x '-ung', as they have the highest frequency of all nomi  nalisations in the three intralingual versions (see section 2.1). The high frequency of this feature, however, raises the question, which instances we want to rephrase. If we rephrased all instances, the sentence structure would become overly complex. Furthermore, this would not match the frequency in the newspaper reports. We therefore have to make  a  selection.  One  should  think  that  nominalisations  created  on an ad-hoc basis to condense clausal meaning into a nominal structure qualify for rephrases. However, most instances of nominalisations are lexicalised through frequent use. Often both, the nominal and the verbal form of the lemma, are equally frequent. The most plausible candidates therefore are accumulations of '-ung'-nominalisations within the same noun phrase construction. The fi  rst rephrasing step consists in using the verbal form of the lemma, thus creating a clausal structure. In those cases where the rephrasing results in a non-fi  nite subordinate clause, this clause is again rephrased into a fi  nite clause. Example 3 is a case in point.

- 3a Bei  der  Abwägung  zwischen  den  Belangen  der  Beschwerdeführerin einerseits und dem Persönlichkeitsrecht der Kläger andererseits gebühre dem Interesse der Kläger an einer Veröffentlichung der Richtigstellung auf der Titelseite der Vorrang.
- 3b Bei  der  Abwägung  zwischen  den  Belangen  der  Beschwerdeführerin einer  seits und dem Persönlichkeitsrecht der Kläger andererseits gebühre dem Interesse der Kläger daran, eine Richtigstellung auf der Titel  seite zu veröffent  lichen, der Vorrang.
- 3c Bei  der  Abwägung  zwischen  den  Belangen  der  Beschwerdeführerin einer  seits und dem Persönlichkeitsrecht der Kläger andererseits gebühre dem Interesse der Kläger daran, dass eine Richtigstellung auf der Titelseite veröffentlicht wird, der Vorrang.

## Limitations of the rephrasing process

Originally, we had expected to be able to develop rules for rephrasing each syntactic dimension. However, the instances proved too hetero  gene  ous to maintain the same strategy for each sentence in one syntactic dimension. In order to be able to systematise the procedure, it may help to categorise the structures from a functional perspective and then develop rules for each function identifi  ed. Within the given limitations of our stu  dy this has to be left for future research.

As previously mentioned, the rephrasing process has consequences for the coherence structure of the text. When we break up complex sentences into simple sentences without or almost without embedding - as we do in the maximum version C -, we risk causing a loss of textual co  herence. As it is no longer possible to insert local intrasentential cohe  sive ties, we can only create coherence by establishing cohesive ties on intersentential level. However, adding cohesive elements to every simple sentence often produces an awkward style inappropriate for written language. Therefore, in this study we try to minimalise the elements ad  ded  in  the  rephrases,  thus  inserting  cohesive  elements  only  where absolute  ly necessary. A future study focussed on textual characteristics of legal texts may provide further insight into the requirements for improv  ed comprehensibility regarding cohesion and coherence.

## Preparation of the experiment

We restrict our experimental data to those sentences which clearly display one of the three syntactic dimensions mentioned above. This is done in order to avoid phenomena assumed to impede the understanding of the sentence in question, which could distort the results of the test. Where necessary, we therefore slightly change the original sentences (ver  sion A) in order to discard any possible interfering elements. Ex  ample 4 below shows a sentence from the corpus used for testing the syntactic dimension P. The target phrase is underlined in the test sen  tence in 4b. Compared to the original sentence in 4a, it becomes clear that the changes affect the length of other phrases which are not in the fo  cus of the present stimulus.

- 4a
- Original sentence from the corpus Allerdings stehe der familienrechtlichen Lösung in § 1626 a BGB im ge  rem Zusammenleben mit diesem die verfassungsrechtliche Wertung ent  gegen, dass weder dem Elternrecht der Mutter noch dem des Vaters
- 4b

Falle einer Trennung der Eltern eines nichtehelichen Kindes nach länein Vorrang eingeräumt werden könne.

- Test sentence (target phrase underlined)

Allerdings stehe der familienrechtlichen Lösung im Falle einer Trennung der Eltern eines nichtehelichen Kindes nach längerem Zusammen  leben mit diesem entgegen, dass weder der Mutter noch dem Vaters ein Vorrang eingeräumt werden könne.

The third part of the study consists in testing the rephrases in a psycholin  guistic experiment in order to determine whether rephrasing the complex structures of the court decisions improves the comprehensi  bility for lay persons. As this is the main focus of the current paper, it will be de  scribed in more detail in the following section.

## 3. Processing complex and rephrased versions: the psycholinguistic test

## 3.1.  Method

The underlying assumption of our psycholinguistic experiment is that long  er reading times equal either deeper processing or more complex texts. Reading times can be measured in a self paced reading experiment (Mitchell 1987) which is chosen as the optimal testing method given the limited resources of the study. Measuring the reading times for the different versions gives an indication of the processing effort the participants need for these versions. Furthermore, self paced reading represents a good indica  tor of comprehensibility when combined with compre  hension  questions  and  measuring  the  response  latencies,  i.e.  the time, participants need to answer the comprehension questions.

The 45 participants consist of 36 lay persons, mainly students of Saarland University, and 9 experts, i.e. legal experts and advanced law students. As we intend to test these subjects on the three versions A, B and C, they are split up into three groups consisting of 15 participants (12 lay persons and 3 experts), respectively (see below). We exclude students or experts of linguistics and law from the group of lay persons. The subjects were paid 4 Euros for participating in the experiment.

In the experiment, the texts are presented on two portable computers using the software DMDX 5 . The participants' task is to read the texts on the screen. The words of a sentence appear on request by mouse click. The programme logs all mouse clicks and computes the time from one mouse click to the next, thus recording the time the participant takes to pro  cess one word.

We use 30 sentences from the rephrasing process as stimuli. For each syn  tactic dimension (S, P, N) 10 sentences are chosen. Each of the sentences is realised in the versions A, B and C described above in section 2.2. In order to give the sentences some context, we include fi  ller sentences  where  appropriate.  These  sentences  serve  to  introduce  the circum  stances  and  remain  unchanged  in  all  three  versions.  They  are part  ly  taken  from  the  corpus  and  partly  individually  written  adapted to the stimuli. Example 5 shows that the fi  ller sentences are simpler in their structure and introduce some content which is then elaborated on in the stimulus.

## 5 Filler 1:

Die Gesetzgebungszuständigkeit der Länder ist nicht durch Bundesrecht ausgeschlossen.

Filler 2:

Auch die Finanzverfassung des Grundgesetzes steht der Abgabenerhebung nicht entgegen.

5 http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kforster/dmdx/dmdx.htm

Stimulus dimension S, version A:

Der Zweite Senat hat geklärt, dass es für die kompetenzrechtliche Zuläs  sig  keit  einer  nichtsteuerlichen Abgabe nicht darauf ankommt, ob sie den Anforderungen standhält, die sich aus der Begrenzungs- und Schutz  funktion der bundesstaatlichen Finanzverfassung ergeben.

The stimuli (and fi  ller) appear in randomised order and are each fol  lowed by a comprehension question, which is proofread by a jurist checking the legal content of the question. The question corresponding to the sti  mulus in example 5 is given here as example 6.

- 6 Wurde geklärt, worauf es für die kompetenzrechtliche Zulässigkeit ankommt?

Like the fi  llers these questions also remain unchanged in all versions and have to be answered with yes or no. A short break is included before the question to avoid inadvertent clicking instead of answering the que  stion.

We thus obtain the following design. Three complexity conditions (ver  sions A, B, C) and two expertise conditions (lay persons, experts) re  sult in a 3x2 factorial design. 15 participants - 12 lay persons and 3 experts - are assigned to each of the three complexity conditions at random.

We do not follow the moving windows paradigm where a word disappears as soon as the next is requested. We expect that the participants might loose track of the highly complex sentences from the court decisions  if  they  cannot  move  back  within  one  sentence.  However,  we analyse the reading times with regard to so called windows, i.e. recurring areas in a sentence which indicate additional cognitive load. The analysis does not suggest any noticeable windows. Probably, the parti  cipants request the words until they see a complete sentence on the screen and then process the whole sentence. Therefore we only consider aggre  gated reading times for complete sentences. The reading times for all  individual words of a sentence as logged by DMDX are summed and  divided  by  the  number  of  tokens  of  each  complexity  condition as  the  versions  differ  in  length.  The  time  span  from  appearance  of the  comprehension  question  to  its  answering,  the  response  latency, is interpreted as logged by the programme. The number of correct responses is summed. Any outliers are eliminated.

## 3.2.  Hypotheses

The psycholinguistic test aims at identifying the differences in the cognitive processing of the three rephrased versions of legal texts de  scribed above. We review processing by measuring three dependent variables: 1) reading times, 2) response latencies and 3) correctness of res  ponses given  by  the  subjects.  Independent  variables  are  1)  degree  of  complexity and 2) expertise. Combining these two types of variables in hypo  theses allows us to draw conclusions about the comprehensibility of the three rephrased versions A, B and C.

The group of experts only serves as an explorative group, since it is too small to yield any signifi  cant results. In order to permit a com  parison between lay persons and experts both groups should be of comparable size. Therefore, we do not formulate any hypotheses in con  nection with the comparison. However, we will briefl  y discuss the results for this group in section 3.3. We concentrate on detecting dif  fe  rences in the comprehensibility of the three rephrased versions A, B and C by varying the degree of complexity along three syntactic di  men  sions S, P and N, as has been explained above. However, we do not intend to compare the difference in comprehensibility between the three grammatical dimensions as this comparison is problematic from a lin  guistic point of view. While comparing the effect of varying different syntactic struc  tures on the comprehensibility constitutes an interesting research ques  tion, we cannot analyse it with our research design. This question would require a design focussed on the different structures and leaving aside the study of legal language.

In consideration of the above mentioned conditions we can formulate the general assumption that rephrasing version A, which displays a very high complexity on all syntactic levels, will increase comprehensibility. The expected effect of the two rephrases on the comprehensibility for lay readers can be described as follows. Maximally simplifying the syntac  tic  structures should result in the shortest reading times in version C. Simple sentences do not require tracing back complicated structures and should therefore be the version requiring less reading time than the other two versions. However, cognitive processing is not stimulated by these simple structures. According to Groeben & Christmann (1989) this should destruct the reader's motivation to read carefully and then memorise what he/she read. We thus expect that participants read  ing version  C  take  longer  to  answer  the  comprehension  questions  and answer them less well than those reading version B which have a cog  nitive stimulus in the medium complex sentences. Version A is ex  pect  ed to perform worst because the complex structures ask too much from the lay persons not familiar with these structures. More precisely, we can establish the following hypotheses for the interpretation of the fi  ndings about the three above mentioned dependent variables:

The reading times for version A are longer than the reading times for version B, which is of medium complexity. The reading times for  version  B  are  longer  than  the  reading  times  for  version  C,

- H1 Reading times: A > B > C which constitutes a maximum simplifi  cation.

The response latencies for version A are longer than the response latencies for version C. The response latencies for version C are

- H2 Response latencies: A > C > B longer than the response latencies for version B.
- H3 Correctness of responses: A < C < B In version A less correct responses are given than in version C. In version C less correct responses are given than in version B.

## 3.3.  Findings

Our main focus in connection with the fi  ndings is the performance of the lay participants. The results for this group's reading times in the three versions A, B and C as displayed in Figure 1 are partially signi  fi  cant, i.e. they partially confi  rm our hypothesis H1. In more detail, the dif  ference between version A and B is not signifi  cant. The difference between version B and version C is signifi  cant. This means that the test per  sons read version C much more quickly than the other two versions. How  ever,  reading  times  for  version  B  which  is  of  medium  syntactic com  plexity almost equal those for version A as the most complex version.  While  being  much  less  complex,  version  B  still  seems  to  cost much processing effort.

Figure 1: Lay persons' reading times for the three versions

<!-- image -->

Note here, that reading times do not allow inferences about the comprehen  sion itself. They measure the duration of processing but are not a direct  indicator  of  the  comprehensibility  of  a  text.  This  can  only  be determin  ed on the basis of the results for all three dependent variables.

Figure 2: Lay persons' response latencies for the three versions

<!-- image -->

Our hypothesis H2 regarding the response latencies is partly confi  rmed as  depicted  in  Figure  2.  While  the  mean  latency  for  lay  readers  of ver  sion  A  is  signifi  cantly  higher  than  for  readers  of  version  B,  the dif  ference between version B and C is not signifi  cant. Participants thus have most diffi  culties in processing version A, therefore they need much more time  to  answer  the  comprehension  questions  than  in  the  other two  versions.  In  the  rephrased  versions,  the  processing  effort  seems clear  ly reduced. However participants do not need signifi  cantly more time to process the question in version C than in version B. This result in combination with the result for the reading times suggests that the me  dium complex version B is not processed clearly better than version C. This picture changes when looking at the fi  ndings for correctness of responses for the three rephrased versions A, B and C.

Figure 3: Correctness of lay persons' responses in the three versions

<!-- image -->

As with the other two hypotheses, H3 again is partially confi  rmed. Figure 3 displays the amount of correct responses given for versions A, B and C.

The difference between versions A and B is signifi  cant as is the difference between versions B and C. The participants reading version B are able to answer much more often correctly than are those reading ver- sion A or C. The difference between A and C is not signifi  cant, meaning that both groups of participants have similar diffi  culties responding to the comprehension questions, albeit for different reasons. The dif  fi  culties of participants assigned to version A most likely begin with pro  cessing  the  complex  sentences,  a  problem  manifested  in  the  long reading times and continue with considering a response to the comprehen  sion question. Participants assigned to version C seem to simply run through the sentences without really memorising what they are reading and feel capable of answering the questions quickly, a fact refl  ected in the short response latencies. Because of its medium complexity version B provides enough incentive for the subjects to read the legal text and work towards understanding it correctly.

The results compared by degree of expertise show that the jurists parti  cipating in our experiment have longer reading times and response la  tencies in all three versions. This is probably due to the fact that versions B and C contradict the reading habits of legal experts: the expert re  cog  nises the sentences as originating from a legal text and has to incorporate the differences to what he/she expects. Jurists give more correct responses than the lay participants. This does not come as a surprise as the experts compre  hend the legal content regardless of the syntactic form. A cautionary note is in place, since these results only constitute tendencies  not  based  on  statistical  tests.  They  show  the  difference between the two recipient groups of court decisions and have to be kept in mind when varying the syntactic structure of court decisions.

## 3.4.  Interpretation

We are able to show that, broadly speaking, syntactic rephrases improve pro  cessing with lay readers, thus confi  rming our general assumption. The  experiment  leaves  no  doubt  that  version A,  i.e.  sentences  from court decisions, massively impedes the comprehensibility for lay readers. The lay persons assigned to this version read longer, consider their re  sponses  longer  and  still  answer  the  comprehension  questions  less well than those assigned to the rephrased versions. We can say that the syn  tactic structures of version A are too complex for the participants to understand them correctly.

While reading times do not support our hypothesis that the B-version is processed faster by the lay readers, the combined interpretation of all three dependent variables - reading times, response latencies and correct  ness - show that version B leads to an optimal improvement of the com  prehensibility. Compared to version A, the participants assigned to version B do not read faster in this version but  take signifi  cantly faster to answer the comprehension questions and - what is most important -  are in the position to answer the questions more often correctly. This shows that, in comparison to version A, the comprehensibility has improv  ed.

The C-version does not perform better in this overall interpretation. Although the reading times are signifi  cantly shorter in this version than in the other two versions and the participants answer the questions as quickly as the readers of the B-version, they are not able to give as many correct responses as in the B-version. The simple syntactic structures seem to lead to a loss of cognitive motivation for the subjects to read the texts properly in order to understand them correctly. There are two possible explana  tions for this: fi  rst, the overly simple structures of this  version  may induce the readers to not start cognitive processing of what they are reading. This explanation is in line with Groeben & Christmann's  (1989)  motivation-  and  cognition-based  approach.  The se  cond explanation is that the structures are resolved beyond what the lay reader expects. The logical relation between clauses is shifted to the sentence level, leading to a text structure which is less cohesive. Version B creates enough textual coherence to linguistically link parts of the text in a meaningful way. This is not the case in the maximal simplifi  cation of version C. In this version information is spread so spar  se  ly in short and simple sentences that it partially lacks cohesive ties to establish meaningful relations in the text as discussed in section 2.2. This lack of textual coherence may complicate processing and decrease compre  hensibility and, fi  nally, result in a low amount of correct responses to comprehension questions. Thus, both the A- and the C-version do not con  form to the reading habits of the lay reader, leaving version B which fol  lows the degree of syntactic complexity found in the newspaper reports as the version understood best by the lay readers.

## 4. Conclusions and outlook

The study presented here gives us an in-depth look at the workings of three syntactic features of court decisions. Each of the three metho  dol- ogical steps contributes its part to the overall picture. First, we built a cor  pus annotated with syntactic information on German court decisions and related text types. The interpretation of this corpus in itself may yield valuable results for the analysis of German legal language. We used  the  cor  pus  to  investigate  how  syntactic  specifi  cities  of  court decisions are varied in the related text types of press releases and newspaper reports on the decisions. The corpus analysis also enabled us to retrieve the most distinctive instances from the subcorpus of court decisions, which were then used for the rephrasing process.

The second step showed the possibilities and limitations of the rephras  ing process. On the basis of the instances retrieved from the corpus, we elaborated two rephrases: a medium complex one with syn  tactic structures demanding some cognitive effort from the recipient and a simple one which builds on the assumption that maximally simple structures  are  memorised  best. We  identifi  ed  limitations  with  each  of  the three syntactic features varied in this process. The specifi  cities of each instance rephrased made it obvious that there is a need for more fi  negrained (functional) analyses of complex structures in a future study. This may ultimately lead to rules for automatically rephrasing complex syn  tactic structures.

Finally, the results of the psycholinguistic experiment help us understand what a comprehensible court decision could look like. The study showed that rephrases with a medium degree of syntactic complexity similar to that of newspaper reports score better when tested with lay per  sons. This clearly shows that the language of court decisions is not adapt  ed to the needs of lay citizens as one of two recipient groups of court decisions. However, the comparison of the two groups of expertise, i.e. the two recipient groups, indicated that legal experts will not easi  ly accept rephrases from the type scoring best with lay persons as they contradict the jurists' expectations. This may change in the future if research fi  ndings such as those presented here are used for teaching legal writing to law students. If they learn a plain writing style at an early stage in their formation it will become natural to them to put complex facts in a simple way.

In a broader view, a cautionary note is in place. Syntactic changes can  not remedy the inherent incomprehensibility of the law itself. They on  ly operate on the surface level. Furthermore, on this surface level, the changes should not be limited to the level of syntax on which we have con  centrated in this study but have to be combined with changes in the lexis used as well as in the overall cohesive structure of the text. For this purpose, continuative studies on these levels have to be conducted. It remains to be seen, however, what these combined linguistic efforts can  achieve  towards  the  goal  of  improving  the  comprehensibility  of legal language.

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