The Semantics of before in the Nigeria Criminal Code Act

Abstract

This paper is premised on the semantic analysis of the preposition Before in the ‘Nigeria Criminal Code Act’. The study opts for the preposition due to its paramount importance in languages, and the vital roles its proper usage and understanding could play in the interpretation of laws. The Nigeria Criminal Code Act’ was used to determine the senses associated with the preposition serves as the primary source of data collection. The study gleans the semantics through the extensive reading from the primary source to detect the semantics from the contexts; and the reading of relevant Dictionaries and other published and unpublished books on the semantics of preposition before to collect the semantic networks of the selected preposition. A table is used to showcase the recurrence of the selected preposition before and its senses in the chosen legal text. The work advances the Principled Polysemy Approach to first explore both prototypical and extended senses of the preposition in English as a natural language with a view to serving as the threshold and premises for the examination of its senses in the chosen legal text; and to see if there is any peculiarity in the senses associated with the selected preposition in the text. The research concludes that, the extended senses are the only senses associated with the selected preposition in the document. There is no significant difference between the semantics of before, in the document and its senses in everyday English. Though, the language of the law is different from everyday language, this is not applied to all aspects of the language. This paper from the study concludes that the use of the one-word preposition in legal language is not different from their uses in everyday language.