THE RATIO OF THE CONCEPTS «CLARITY», «UNDERSTANDABILITY», «ACCESSIBILITY» AND «SIMPLICITY» IN THE FIELD OF LANGUAGE AND LAW

The author attempts to differentiate the popular concepts of legal and linguistic discourse used to characterize the receptivity of a normative text. The purpose of this study was the scientific uncertainty of concepts «clarity», «understandability», «accessibility» and «simplicity». This uncertainty does not allow us to distinguish the specifics of these concepts, which leads to a blurring of their meaning for each of them. To overcome it the author explores the correlation and meaning of these concepts in different areas of language application: natural, scientific, legal. The natural language meaning is studied through various dictionaries of the Russian language, the scientific meaning through the opinions of scientists on this matter, and the legal one through the analysis of normative legal acts. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that clarity, understandability, simplicity and accessibility are interrelated, but not synonymous concepts. It was concluded that clarity should be called the totality of the addresser’s ideas about the ability of the addressee to understand the text, understandability is the characteristic of speech in which the addressee is able to perceive the meaning of the text close to the addressee’s intention, accessibility should be called the actual ability to read the text, and simplicity is the appropriate choice of linguistic units and syntactic constructions.