International Symposium on Language, Law and Life
[15-17 Dec. 2003, Lucknow, India]
Shikhaa Beri, Student,
NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India;
sberi03@hotmail.com
SALUS POPULI EST
SUPREMA LEX- Regard for the public welfare is the highest law. BUT, would that
very ‘public’, understand the meaning and substance contained in
the abovementioned maxim? Yes, the layman, the common man, the public. For that
ordinary person, the legal jargon is all Hebrew and so are most of the matters
concerning the law that he comes across.
Legalese, a very grandiloquent term
indeed, describing something, that in my opinion serves no useful purpose and
instead makes the language of law problematic, saving style and form that it
lends to legal texts. But where this style is at the cost of substance and
clarity of expression for the common man, it becomes unnecessary and quite a nuisance.
In his book, Language and the Law John
Gibbons talks about ‘language constructing the law’ as well as
‘the language disadvantage before the law’. Language can be a boon
or a bane depending upon how it is used by the writers of law. When law itself
is concerned with safeguarding the interests and rights of the common man, the
language must cater to them. Not only to ensure that he can bring it to his aid
but also because he has a right to be made aware of the Law that governs him,
in an elucidated form. The occurrence of Latin words and phrases in
English legal texts pose problems even for lawyers and EALP (English for Academic Legal Purposes) students in their reading as
brought out by Dennis Kurzon in one of his papers. (Latin for Lawyers:
Degrees of Textual Integration)
A simplification of the legalese is required so that the language of
the common man is the language of the law, the use of plain English instead of the alien legal jargon.
In August 1976 the first plain English document in Australia was
released- a car insurance policy using readable English instead of old-style
legalese. And now, with support of the government through various law
simplification and plain English programs, it has really come of age as
private, public and community sector organizations realize the importance of
clear communication.
In Britain also, the movement started in 1979 with the Plain English
Campaign- a grassroots organization. And by 1982, the British government
adopted a formal plain English policy. Today legislative guidelines throughout
the world encourage drafters to make legislations clear and intelligible to the
common man.
The international plain English movement has gathered force in the
last ten years, but there’s still a long way to go. The movement will
succeed in its purpose when the writers are convinced that the costs of poor
communication are enormous and also cured of the misconception that plain
English would mean sacrificing accuracy for clarity.
Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy,
Law Faculty, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland.
sofie.cacciaguidi@nuigalway.ie
The Right to Linguistic Diversity or
Language Discrimination before The Law? Deconstructing The University College,
Galway Act 1929
Linguistic
disadvantages or language inequities before the law are not always to be found
in the Courtroom or in Government’s language policy making but can
similarly be observed in labour law. This paper proposes to highlight a
different type of language and linguistic‘discrimination’ when
facing the law all together.
Under Section 3, The University
College, Galway Act 1929 requires that the University must “… appoint to such office
or situation a person who is competent to discharge the duties thereof through
the medium of the Irish language”, patently disadvantaging non-Irish
speaking candidates. The Act purports to protect the use and the implementation
of the Irish language, thereby requesting that all academic and administrative
employees, as set out in Statute XXXII, sit a statutory examination in the
Irish language (oral and written) independently of the recruitment interview
taking place.
This paper will discuss how the
legal discourse of the Act and subsequent Statutes have been used as a mean of
constructing and reinforcing national identity. Using Dáil Debates
(Parliament), the 1929 Act, minutes of discussion at Faculties, Academic
Council, Udarás na hOllscoile (Governing Authority), this paper intends
to carry out an analysis of:
·
the legal language contained in the
1929 Act, Statute XXXII and other subsequent amending Statutes;
·
the rhetoric of the Act debates since
1929 to highlight the strategies adopted by the academic community to exploit
the lacunas of the language of the Act;
·
how the Irish language requirement of
the Act and the principles of linguistic diversity and non-discrimination,
under the European Charter for Minority Languages, are reconciled and
integrated into the framework of an increasingly multilingual and multi-ethnic
Irish society;
·
analyse the legal consequences of the
Act, Statutes for the recruitment/appointment process and the legal challenges
to the Act.
Lastly, it will consider the interaction between language, national identity and the law, in light of the Groener 1989 ruling by the ECJ reflecting a greater willingness to address the complex legal realities and disadvantages of the use of Irish as the first constitutional language.
Parboty
Chakraborty, Kolkata, India
jainnikhil123@rediffmail.com
Indian legal
system primarily consists of srutis and smrtis. This is laid down in the Vedas
originally and later in the Samhitas of many exponents like Manu,
yajnayavalkya, Vasistha, Harita and others. The concept of dharma is the source
of law in the Indian perspective of jurisprudence. But in such wide range of
texts handed down from generation to generation, problems may arise regarding
the language of the law. Some methods of interpretation of language naturally
originated to apply the correct justice following the books of law and their
commentaries too. The principles of interpretation help in understanding the
correct meaning of a provision of law. In the cases of ambiguities, seemingly
contradiction, conflicts between different sources of law and other doubtful
areas, the procedure adopted by India traditional thinkers are required to
settle the meaning for each issue and consider arguments both for and against,
and to arrive at a final decision. There are some maxims or Nyaya which may be
used either for interpretation of the provision or to explain the situation in a
given case forcefully.
The present paper makes an humble attempt to deal with some methods
of interpretation concerning the language of the law.
Janet Cotterill;
jcotterill@yahoo.com
[Abstract
to be announced later]
Celina Frade, Doctoral Student in
Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
(FAPERJ), Brazil; celinafrade@uol.com.br
This paper addresses recontextualization in
legislative genre in the two main contemporary legal systems: the common law
and the civil law. Though similar in their intent to regulate human activities
by words, legislative genre displays variations in the way information is recontextualized
in both systems. Recontextualization is a dialogistic property of legislative
genre which involves the relocation of parts (or aspects) from previous
legislation and their fitting into other legislation, which results in textual
changes and changes in meaning as well.
In general, the two types of legislative recontextualization are
intratextuality and intertextuality. The former is more local and concerns the
relations between or within section and subsections; whereas, the latter is
wider in scope and involves
cross-referring to other legislation or legal texts and the implicit shared
specialized knowledge of the meanings of legal principles and concepts
associated with the profession. But, most relevant of all, recontextualization
affects the law interpreting in terms of the linguistic and pragmatic concepts
of generality, fuzziness and vagueness of terms and expressions dependent upon
each legal system usage and immediate context of application. We illustrate our
claims here with examples taken from two modern arbitration model laws: the
UNCITRAL Model Law on the International Commercial Arbitration and the
Brazilian Arbitration Law. To conclude, we suggest further research on
legislative genre across legal systems. (220 words)
Sandra Gollin, University of Western Sydney, Australia;
s.gollin@uws.edu.au
Embedding language awareness in the law
curriculum: a scaffolded approach
The language of
the law is generally perceived as difficult and obscure, even to native
speakers. For law students whose first language is not English, the
unfamiliarity is compounded by lack of confidence in reading cases, thinking
about them within critical frameworks specific to legal discourses and in
writing effectively about them in academic English. In a current project at an
Australian university, these issues are addressed in a practical way. In a
first year core legal subject, the academic discourse skills involved in
preparing a single assignment are analysed and the assignment preparation
process, including case analysis, critically reading sources, summarizing,
planning and writing responses are carefully scaffolded and practised within
the curriculum. The benefit of this approach is that genre-specific language
skills are embedded in the course structure, making the learning of academic
legal discourse more meaningful and immediately available than through learning
generic skills in a separate course.
Risto Hiltunen,
Department of English, 20014 University of Turku, Finland
In the last few
decades, the language of the law, as it appears in the British Acts of
Parliament, seems to have undergone some marked changes in its syntactic
structures. Reading present-day
Parliamentary Acts side by side with their earlier counterparts from a couple
of decades ago suggests that the texts have become "simpler" in
certain respects over the years. The materials indicate, in other words, a
process of
"simplification".
This paper will examine the reasons for the overall impression of
simplification in terms of some of the syntactic parameters of prototypical
legislative texts that are traditionally regarded as features complicating the
language of the law, especially
those having to do with sentence structure. By comparing earlier and
present-day data in this respect, it will possible to explain how (deliberate)
syntactic change has affected legislative writing internally in the past few
decades. The external motivation for such a development, on the other hand,
will have to be sought in the social pressures of extralinguistic reality.
Gayane Hovhannisyan,
Yerevan State Pedagogical University, 5 Kanjyan Street, Yerevan 375010, Armenia
gayamlt@arminco.com
[Abstract to be announced later]
Maya Khemlani David,
Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur 50603,
Malaysia
mayadavid@yahoo.com
Richard Powell, College
of Economics, Nihon University, Misaki-cho 1-3-2, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan
ricpowell@yahoo.com
Constraints On Language Choice In Postcolonial
Legal Systems:
Comparing Kenya And Malaysia
Why does English
continue to dominate written and even spoken discourse in the legal systems of
most former British colonies, including polities with more widely spoken
national or official languages? Evidence from two polities at opposite ends of
the postcolonial language planning spectrum suggests that localised
sociocultural and technical constraints have a marked influence on language
choice.
In Kenya, although far more people have greater proficiency in the
national language, Kiswahili, lawyers are trained and judicial proceedings
conducted almost entirely in English, which is the only language the
constitution is drafted in. In contrast, comprehensive efforts have been made
in Malaysia to implement Malay as the language of the courts, in keeping with
national language policy. Yet here too, the education and culture of the legal
profession produces patterns of code-switching in the courtrooms that evince a
central role for English.
By comparing the overall position of English in two divergent legal
systems from a language-planning perspective, this paper considers some of the
barriers to vernacularising postcolonial law, focusing in particular on:
national language policy; corpus planning; legal training; and de jure and de
facto language use in the courts.
Ketan Makhija
Debarupa Banerjee,
Students, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India;
newtonforever1@yahoo.com
When Shakespeare
made Hamlet say to the grave-digger “Why may not this be the skull of a
lawyer? Where now be his quiddities, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and
his tricks?” he had really managed to capture the essence of the relation
between the lawyer and his legendary rhetoric. Shakespeare had meant this to be
a slur rather than a compliment and this distinction is important because it
highlights the fact that the problem of pompous, complicated language of the
law was as recognised then as it is now. It would not be wrong to say that the
problem is even more acute in today's context than what it was even a few
decades back. With more and more people becoming aware of their rights under
the law, with more and more and people taking recourse to the law, the language
of the law is increasingly posing hurdles to the comprehension skills of the
layman instead of the reverse being expected. What is it that makes lawyers, judges
and legislators act in tandem when it comes to mystifying the language of the
law? Why is such mystification
required- is it the exclusion of the non-legal fraternity that is the primary objective here? Ultimately what
is the advantage in using legal argot when plain and simple language is equally
or perhaps, more effective?
On the whole, the dubious
distinction that the language of the law enjoys at present should be done away
with and done away fast. The only way in which this can be done is to throw the
doors wide open for the layman, to include him, to make the language of the law
as simple and plain as can be. This is even more relevant when we attach so
much of importance to the maxim- ignorance of the law is no excuse. As rational
beings, does not it strike us as odd that we are expected to know the law when
the language of the law is not at all conducive for the same?
The technicality and the ambiguity of this language is justified on
certain grounds. Firstly, that this language is meant for both legal and lay
persons and so it has to be in its present form. Secondly, the use of such
language also helps demonstrate the power and authority of the legal personnel.
But are these sound justifications? There is a considerable scope
for doubt at this juncture.
The language of the law is wordy, dull, unclear and pompous. So, the
objective of this paper is to attempt to divulge the incomprehensible character
of the legal language, reasoning out simultaneously, the justifications for and
against the existence of such a form and pattern. The possible solutions to
this problem shall also be suggested.
B. Mallikarjun, Central Institute of Indian
Languages, Manasagangothri, Mysore, India;
mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net
The history of
language rights in the Indian can be traced back to the period of the Emperor Ashoka
( 268 - 226 BC). He was the first ruler to recognize the language rights of
people. He ordered that his edicts and directions relating to governance and
righteous living were communicated to the people in their language, and not in
his language only. Hence, today we see his inscriptions in the languages of the
people in different parts of the country. That was the time when the
‘law’ was normally not written, but was mainly conventional and
practiced by the people as given tenets of life for the community and
individuals to follow. Although executive orders and decisions were recorded
(we see this happening in some inscriptions retrieved throughout the
subcontinent), written Law or codification of laws as a body of literature that
was intended to be adhered to and interpreted in judicial proceedings is almost
an innovation, in spite of the widespread knowledge of Manu’s Dharma
Shastra, and Islamic Shariat. This was a contribution of the British rule and
it had its own impact. The formal system of justice was institutionalized
through appropriate constitutional provisions. Adjudication or judicial review
of rights relating to language and other cultural institutions naturally formed
part of this process
Paulston (1997) writes, “Language rights is an important new
topic for us, because their existence usually reveals past and present
injustice or exploitation against the weak in the world. Our responsibility as
academics is the careful exploration of the nature of language rights and their
consequences.” Accepting this statement as a general premise, it is
intend to document, analyze, and interpret the status of language rights in
general (inclusive of both the majority and minority populations) as they exist
in the statutes and their practice in reality in India.
In the literature, the term ‘language right’ is treated
synonymously with ‘linguistic rights’ and ‘linguistic human
rights’. Some scholars consider these as individual rights and some
others consider them as collective rights. Different scholars and different
countries treat them differently. There are overt primary rights, often
formulated explicitly, and secondary rights that are covert in nature because
these secondary rights are the consequences of some other right. The epicenter
around which the discussion of language rights normally revolves is mainly the
rights of the linguistic minorities.
The sources of these rights are: the international declarations,
constitutions of the countries, legislation, policy statements, the official
communiqués issued by the countries for the promulgation and
implementation of language related orders and declarations, reports of the
committees or commissions and the judgments of the courts relating to language
use in different domains.
The wind of economic globalization blowing across the world is
bringing changes in every sphere of large number of countries. The acceptance
of globalization as a dominant economic model has introduced certain urgency to
modify even language loyalty and identity questions in the minds of the
citizens of various countries. English is fast replacing other languages as the
lingua franca.
This paper discusses: Rights relating to language education at all
levels as enshrined in the constitution; rights bestowed through official
orders in continuation of the constitution ; the interpretation of the rights
relating to language by the courts of law
and the rights applicable as part of the declaration of the human
rights. These include - primarily right to learn a language, right to learn through
a language and secondarily rights of users of languages and the rights of
languages themselves.
Hisham Obeidat,
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan;
A legal
document, “Specific Power of Attorney”, was translated from English
into Arabic, and forwarded to the department of land to authorize the
attorney-in-fact act on behalf of his representative. Alas! The document was
rejected by the clerk at the department of land on the ground that the document
does not sound legal, let alone idiomatic Arabic. The attorney in fact passed
to me the Arabic document along with the English to figure out the reason (s)
upon which the Arabic is altogether rejected. In turn, I have gone over the
Arabic and compared it with the English to conclude that the performative
utterances deployed in the English document are leveled to the zero denying the
attorney the legal right(s) and the authority given to him to execute the
instrument.
Teaching an advanced course in terminology, inherited from a
colleague, I passed both the Arabic and the English documents to my M.A
students enrolled in the course. Unlike the clerk at the department of land,
the students assume that the Arabic translation sounds a good legal document
for it is being faithful to the English. In brief, I argued with the students
the reason(s) behind adopting the
metaphor of “a faithful wife to her husband” as a translation
strategy to cope with texts like, for instance, legal genre. They ascribe this
to their training as the focus centres around the translator, the photocopying
machine and not a creative writer who weighs both the spirit of the legal
document and the demands of the consumer. Contrary to this perception, I faced
the students with the response of the clerk at the department of land.
Puzzlement appeared on their faces, with whom to make business the theory they
grasped in the class room or the consumer, the clerk or the lawyer, etc.
This paper concerns itself with finding a positive response to the paradox
erupted due to serious discrepancy between the recipe given to the students and
the consumer’s demand. The translation strategy(s) offered in the
training programme, department of English, Yarmouk University is fundamentally
source text oriented, hence it suffers serious limitations, turning the
translator to just a machine. Fundamentally, it is the purpose of this paper to
steer the students’ perception to devise a translation strategy(s),
accommodating both domains of the equation, the ST and the TT. A strategy that
is capable of giving the translator a room to maneuver, to be creative to
satisfy the demands of the consumer. To do so, the paper would recourse to
readers’ response as one of the parameters to provide evidence(s) that is
significantly crucial to account for the TT readership, in the meantime.
Devaraj Panda, Dept. of
Zoology, B.J.B. College, Bhubaneswar (Orissa), India
Legal terms of marriage in Manu Samhit and their adoptation
in Bengali, Hindi and Oriya: a study
[Abstract
to be announced later]
Ajit Sharma, Student, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India
iceonfire18@hotmail.com
As Society
changes, law cannot remain immutable. The courts can therefore by the process
of judicial interpretation adapt the law to suit the needs of the society. By
interpretation is meant a process by which courts ascertain the meaning of a
statutory provision for the purpose of applying it to a situation before them.
Interpretation, in a modern state, is actuated with some judicial policy to
curb some public evil or to effectuate some public benefit.
The
paper analyses two much publicized pronouncements of India’s apex court wherein the judiciary played a proactive
role in interpreting statutory language to protect the rights of women.
In the Gita Hariharan case the court discussed the law and said that the phrase “and after him” in the guardianship statute did not necessarily mean after the death of the father. It said “after him” would mean in the abscence of, thus affirming that a mother could be natural guardian of her children.
Secondly while delivering the famous Vishakha judgment the court interpreted “Sexual harassment” as violative of the gender equality clause enshrined in article fourteen of the constitution. This judge made law was created in a landmark decision, which avoided strict grammatical interpretation and constructed “Sexual harassment” as inclined towards protection of women’s rights.
The problem of interpretation is a problem of meaning of words and their effectiveness as a medium of expression. Even a cursory examination of our laws will reveal a distinct paternalistic bias. The paper concludes with observation that the courts have not literally but liberally interpreted ambiguous words in favour of protecting the rights and interests of women in India.
K.K. Sharma, Advocate,
Supreme Court of India, A-51, Preet Vihar, Delhi, India;
rkks2003@rediffmail.com
[Full
paper submitted; Abstract not available]
Ranjeet Singh Bajwa,
School of Panjabi Studies, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, Punjab, India;
ranjeet_s_bajwa@yahoo.co.in
Social Action as a Signified Process:
Critical Theory as Operational Legal Sign in Judicial Decisions
This paper
pivots around a judgment of a county judge (Additional Session Judge, at
present Hon'ble Retired Judge of High Court of Punjab and Haryana). This study also falls in the ambit of
'Law and Life' which is significantly concerned with 'Sociology of Law'. our main concern is with the human
behaviour which is measured through rules of logical thought. Life and law perports to various
analytical types of groups in the movement of a durational process in a legal
discourse. Bound to the
continental tradition, law in reality represents itself to us as a species of
discourse (whether concerning itself with the discourse of statuettes, judges,
jurists or doctrines) and as a discourse subject to the law of language or
vice-versa. The present study also
speaks about how legal reasoning conforms to the 'being' of a person killed and
the 'dialectic' of the person who is a killer.
On the whole the legal file which constructs the 'text' of this case
is used here as a corpus which explicates to the pure knowledge in juridical
and cultural sciences.
K. Sundara Raj, Acharya
Patashala College, N.R. Colony, Bangalore, India;
rajsundarak@vsnl.net
This paper
raises a few theoretical questions on the notions of discourse and social
structures. Discourse is a social
construct. Since discourse is a
social practice too, social structures do affect the discourse. At the same time discourse also affects
the social structures bringing about social changes. While legitimizing social practices in the discourse, the
discourse ‘reproduces’ already existing social structures through
‘social actors’. The
‘re-production’ is not a mechanical activity. The social actors, who are also called
subjects, are participants in the discourse in the sense that they are the
recipients of the ‘actions’. Unlike the ‘grammatical subjects’ who do
the ‘actions’, social actors are passive recipients of action. The social actors draw upon the
resources of various social practices and discourse to be creative. Thus the whole process of
‘re-production’ seems to be circular.
The social actors imbibe their roles through institutions, which are
also socially determined. The
institutions legitimize the role of the actors through ‘agendas’, a
set of ‘objectives’.
But the agendas are not overtly stated. These hidden agendas refer to a set of unwritten objectives,
which would mediate and re-produce the existing social structures and
values. Social structures tend to
reproduce – explicit reproduction brings resistance with it. So to undermine this, the ideology is
presented implicitly. Take for
instance the legal discourse.
While high lighting certain ‘ethical’ and
‘moral’ values, each legal practitioner tends to make his/her
presentations in the courts of law highly specialized. This would indeed make the legal
discourse more and more opaque to the ‘common’ man and thus serve the agenda of the legal
institution in a big way.
In this presentation, the above issues are discussed by making
a ‘critical’
linguistic analysis of a particular legal argument.
Mats-Peter Sundstrom, Parlement Europйen, Division de la Traduction Suйdoise, ADG 09A001, Sweden;
MSundstrom@europarl.eu.int
Fostering Foreignness or
Familiarity in Forensic Language?
Theory and Practice around EU
Legal Acts in Swedish Translation
[Topic:
iii. Legal translation and interpretation]
The European Union operates by far the largest ongoing translation project
anywhere in the world. Tens of thousands of pages, to a large extent consisting
of legislative acts and other legal documents are annually translated into ten
other languages than their EU source language, a number soon to be increased to
twenty or twenty-one with the upcoming enlargement May 1 2004 (the variation is
due to the persisting uncertainty regarding the accession of Cyprus as a
divided or unified nation, in which latter case Turkish would also find itself
represented among the official languages of the Member States). Among the
legislative acts, mention may be made particularly of two types: directives and
regulations. The regulations are to be taken over ”lock, stock and
barrel” into the respective legal systems of the Member States and thus
come to appear in exactly the same language form as they had when once
translated. The directives are subject to a procedure of transposition, i. e .
they must incite the Member States to enact laws and other instruments the
contents of which correspond to the intention as expressed in the directives,
although the linguistic form may differ. In either case, however, there opens
up a vast field of opportunities for linguistic influences to play themselves
out on the national level of the various Member States. This is particularly
the case with Member States having minor languages for their official
languages. The reason is; they are almost entirely dependent on translations as
the bulk of legislative work in the European Union is carried out in French and
English, in that order. Obviously so, it might be added: where would for
instance the service of the European Union find a sufficient number of
employees qualified to debate and prepare legal documents of perhaps a highly
technical character in languages such as Danish or, to add one of the newcomers
from 2004, in Maltese?
Although the drafting of EU legal documents
usually takes place in the European Commission, legislative power is vested in
the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. The present
writer intends to examine the issue of languages in the European Union from the
vantage point of a translator working for the European Parliament Swedish
Division. Here, like his colleagues, he deals on a daily basis with essentially
two legislation-related documents: parliamentary reports and opinion where the
European Parliament expresses its view on draft legislative texts prepared by
the Commission and amendments where, as the very name suggests, the parliament
proposes changes in texts about to be adopted.
This said, mention should be made of two diametrally
opposed approaches to legal languages. One consists of recognizing legal texts
as a register where the very subject matter places it own syntactico-stylistic
demands on the language employed, to the effect that this language be
”lofty” or ”elevated” from the concerns of everyday
language. Up until now, this mode of thinking has largely dominated in Europe.
Then comes the Scandinavian view, emphasizing, as it were, language democracy
and ”ordinariness”. Laws and other legal acts should by virtue of
their language be as close to the more humble, day-to-day spheres of life as
possible, with due recognition given to the demands for exactitude and specific
technical expressions. Basically, this has been the prevailing philosophy in
the Scandinavian nations, notably during the post-war period.
The basic aim of this proposed paper is to attempt to find out how EU translators (exemplified by those working for the European Parliament) into a Scandinavian language (exemplified by Swedish) address the seemingly insoluble problem of reconciling two utterly different languages philosophies. We have what we could call an ”elevated style ideal” underlying the vast majority of the source language texts, whereas the target language users traditionally subscribe to a ”plain language ideal”. The discussion will be underpinned with examples taken from translators" manuals and formal sets of rules and illustrated with specimens of authentic translations, prior to and subsequent to language revising. The author thus hopes to give an image of what goes on in the so far largest experiment of practical multilingualism in the world, albeit from a somewhat restricted angle of what must necessary be a far greater whole.