This book continues Roger W. Shuy’s work on language and its use in the legal setting. As in his earlier publications, in Fighting over words Shuy offers a comprehensive account of language use, misuse, and consequent conflicts having to do with legal discourse and its practitioners (lawyers, judges, defendants, plaintiffs, and witnesses). The main theme is civil law discourse as it transpires in concrete cases. Shuy distinguishes among different categories of civil disputations: business contract disputes, deceptive trade practices, product liability, copyright infringement, discrimination, trademarks, and procurement fraud. Almost every category is illustrated with several cases. The chapter about each case has a summary of the debated issues, hand-picked evidence that illustrates these issues, and a linguistic analysis. The choice of the cases is motivated by Shuy’s wish to show how “virtually all of the important tools of linguistics: phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics” (p. 7) can be brought to bear upon case-making.

The theoretical basis for Fighting over words can be broadly defined as instrumentalist. The author advocates a tripartite taxonomy of language use: ordinary and unconscious, specific professional (in this case legal), and contested. Although these levels are codependent, it is contested language that interests Shuy most. In professional practice, this emerges from conflicting interpretations of such things as verb tense, adverb quality, text semantics, professional terms, proper names, pronunciation, intonation, accent, pauses, modifiers, and speech acts. In some cases, several features are analyzed, while in others the author focuses on a specific item.

For example, the first case that comes up under the category of business contract disputes deals with a university group insurance contract case. The case involves a failed eye surgery that prompted the plaintiff to bring a lawsuit against an insurance company that refused to cover the costs of the operation based on the exclusion caveat. As the lawsuit entered the zone of disputation, it appeared that the key point of contention dealt with the conjunction or in the exclusion of “an accidental cut or wound.” Shuy suggests that or in this case be analyzed as to its relationship to the two substantives (cut and wound) in two keys: semantic and discourse analytic. The semantic analysis makes it clear that the phrase reflects the conjunction of “two different types of events,” while the discourse analysis indicates “two separate and different substantive elements of a disjunct” (p. 21). In order to disambiguate this usage, Shuy proposes that the contract should use either/or (in the case of disjunction) or and (in the case of conjunction).

The book is designed to appeal to a wide readership: lawyers, linguists, language specialists, and students. Special emphasis is placed on those readers who wish to extend their theoretical background in linguistics and discourse analysis to practical applications of this analysis in a specific professional setting.