Lexical archaism in public legal text: a study of two Nigerian statutes

This paper is a corpus based analysis of lexical archaism in Public Legal Texts. The study aims at uncovering the incidences of lexical archaism in the selected Nigerian statutes. Incidences of lexical archaism were identified and discussed with emphasis on their effects on the readers. The incidences were illustrated by presenting portions of the text in which they occurred. The study therefore was purely descriptive and qualitative as no attempt was made to quantify the incidences. The findings, however, revealed that compound adverbs and prepositions are the commonest form of lexical archaism noted. Others include the use of doublets, and the use of the modal “shall. “ Latin and French terms as terms of arts were also noted as forms of archaic vocabularies. The study recommends that though lawyers/legal specialists use archaic lexical items on purpose, the study recommends that the use be minimised so that the public will have better understanding public texts.