Abstract
Contemporary linguistic and rhetorical analysis of legislative writing reveals various kinds of indeterminacy, much of it either accidental or unavoidable, but some designed to politically influence subsequent court interpretation. Analysis to date, however, has concentrated on final texts, preventing discovery of rhetorical strategies only evident from an analysis of the text's evolution. Focusing on a contentious attempt in the New Zealand Parliament between 2005 and 2007 to repeal a section in the 1961 Crimes Act that provided parents or guardians with a defense for using excessive physical force on their children, this article reports on an investigation into whether analysis of successive stages of the formal legislative process, including the oral debates in the House of Representatives, might reveal textual traces of non-ambiguous language use designed less to clarify the law than to secure the assent of opposing parties. As well as confirming reliance of the legislative text on indeterminacy, what of particular interest showed up was a significant use of redundancy: a feature which could appear on the surface to be nothing more than a mechanism for achieving precision the holy grail of legal discourse but which in this instance performs additional rhetorical work.
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