Disambiguating Philippine Republic Acts: the case of RA 10913

Abstract This paper analyzes the ambiguities in a Republic Act (RA) promulgated in the Philippines as its way of contributing to the gradually growing number of forensic and legal linguistics research in the country. In particular, it aims to disambiguate the different categories of ambiguities, e.g., lexical, semantic, syntactic, referential, cross-textual and pragmatic, in Republic Act 10913 or the Anti-Distracted Driving Act enacted in 2016. Following a purely qualitative design and a predominantly theoretical approach in the analysis of the ambiguities in the said Republic Act, this paper hopes to offer a potential source of guidance to minimize difficult issues pertinent to the interpretation of the law. This paper also attempts to discuss the basic rationale behind the choice or presence of ambiguous language in a setting such as the drafting of RA 10913 and proposes that there be a ‘cross-fertilization’ between the readings of legal drafters and linguists.