Demystifying Ambiguity: A Forensic Discourse Analysis of Senate Bill No. 2868 or The Anti-Pogo Act

Abstract

This study investigates the linguistic ambiguities in Senate Bill No. 2868, also known as the Anti-POGO Act, using the Classifications of Ambiguity by Bernardo and Albaña-Garrido (2023) in their research on disambiguating the Philippine Republic Act. The researchers utilized forensic discourse analysis to examine the ambiguities employed in the legal text and shed light on the importance of plain language, clarity, precision, and legal intelligibility in drafting statutes to reduce misinterpretation by courts, lawmakers, and laypersons in the Philippine context when passed into law. The analysis of Senate Bill No. 2868 revealed that lexical, contextual, semantic, syntactic, vagueness, referential, cross-textual, and pragmatic ambiguities were identified in the proposed statute. The findings also showed that the modal verb "shall" engenders semantic ambiguity in its use in the legal text, and some typographical errors were discovered. Moreover, this paper highlighted the relationship between the linguistic ambiguities examined and socio-political issues surrounding POGOs in the Philippines. This research is helpful in the analysis of the growing number of forensic discourses in the country and understand the intersection of language and law in the area of scrutiny.