Linguistic Foregrounding by Adding Phonetic, Lexical and Phrasal Parallelism in the Official Documents’ Texts and its Effect on Audience Understanding: a Forensic Linguistic Approach

The documents registered in notary public offices are not deniable after being signed and must be fully understood by the audience. The closer a text is to automatic language, the easier it is to understand. This is why scientific texts, unlike poetic texts, are free from aesthetic devices. To simplify the texts of official documents in forensic linguistics framework, this descriptive-analytical research has tried to identify and if possible, rewrite the samples of foregrounding as a feature of literary language which can take the text far from the automatic language and create difficulty in understanding. In order to identify these samples and to show their effects on understanding, 100 documents (50 from the book of sample documents and 50 from the real documents registered in notary public office no. 1479) were considered. The results revealed that foregrounding in these texts is happening through extra regularities by creating parallelism in 1240 samples in phonetic, lexical, and phrasal levels in Arabic and legal terms. The omission of parallelism and rewriting the samples were possible in a remarkable percentage of samples (65.03%) and these substitutions have caused a significant increase of 40% in the understanding of 100 clients of the notary public office.