UPORABA ATRIBUTA KAO ČIMBENIK SLOŽENOSTI NJEMAČKOGA ZAKONSKOG TEKSTA.

To fullfil its communicational function, legal text is directed to two different groups of addressees: legal experts and lay people. In the communication with the latter group there are often severe problems in understanding. In that respect, since the 17th century in linguistic and legal journals published in German speaking countries, there were some attempts to make the language of law easier to understand to ordinary citizens. Because of the need to be understood by the widest circle of lay addressees and to be applied to all the potential disputes, the expected stylistic features of legal texts are simplicity, clearness, objectivity and exactness, as well as neutrality and logical flow of expression. Numerous objections against complexity and difficulties in understanding suggest that the stylistic features listed above are not sufficiently used in the language of German laws. The aim of this paper is to research to which extent the complexity of legal text is influenced by the frequency of usage of attributes. To this purpose the paper analyses the attributive usage of adjectives and participles on the text corpus of German Act Concernining the Execution of Prison Sentences (Prison Act). Our presumption is that the usage of adjectives and participles functioning as attributes, with regard to their descriptive function in the sentence, should be represented with low intensity within the corpus of the examined legal text. If the results of the research lead to opposite conclusions, that will indicate insufficient objectivity, neutrality and exactness of the legal text as discourse. On the other hand, the formation models and structures of adjectives and participles will indicate whether attributive usage of adjectives and participles can be considered as a factor of stylistic complexity of German legal texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]