Summary
There is an increasing number of legal initiatives to improve the comprehensibility of legal texts, especially those at the interface between experts and laymen. A typical example of this category of (written) communication is the insurance contract with its long list of general clauses. In Europe, clients of insurances have recently been legally protected against incomprehensible clauses comprised in general conditions for contracts by the so-called transparency decree. Insurance companies are bound by law to formulate clauses in a linguistically clear and unmistakable form.
Now, experts and laymen may have different ideas about what makes the text of a contract clear. To find out details about possible differences of communication registers between insurance companies and laymen, one can ask laymen to conceptualise paragraphs with general clauses of insurance contracts. The productions can then be compared with the texts of the professional authors in the scene. Significant differences in the compared text structures can be taken as evidence for the existence of different styles and, hence, difficulties in mutual comprehension can be expected.
In this study, register based differences in the linearisation of sentences in contracts were investigated experimentally. Twenty students were asked to linearise the headings of some twenty paragraphs of the general clauses for household effects insurance-contracts that were presented to them as unordered sets. The data were systematically compared with the linearisation of the ›professional‹ texts.
The results clearly indicate that laymen’s criteria for linearising the sentences and paragraphs of an insurance contract differ from the professional register based linearisation criteria. Under the plausible assumption that the linear sequence of information in a text determines the ease of comprehension, it can be expected that laymen will have considerable difficulties in processing a list of clauses for insurance contracts which follows the linearisation principles and, thus, the clearness standards of professional insurance people instead of the ones underlying their own registers of text production.