The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act

Legal Implicatures and Media Interference

Abstract

The paper proposes a linguistic study of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act of 2012 (CEAA), the latest redraft of the original document (dated 1992), regulating the issue of human (over-)interaction with the natural milieu of the Country. The analysis concerns the main and most relevant linguistic aspects of the CEAA also in consideration of the ample series of modifications, and repealments occurred in comparison with its 1992 draft, focusing on the contemporary social, historical and cultural asset. Moreover, the linguistic investigation outlines the peculiarities of the document on the terminological and syntactic levels mirroring the link between the language conveyed and the legal content applicability in association with the retrieval of significant formulaic divergences, symptomatic of linguistic evolutive phenomena. Eventually, the web-facilitated intermediality of the Act is observed in relation to the evaluative process interferences on behalf of its users and affecting final political decisions about the environmental projects.