Reformulation of Language in the Commentaries Accompanying Russian Legislation in the Field of Intellectual Property

The paper studies the linguistic value of reformulation of language in the commentaries accompanying legal texts, to make them comprehensible to non-lawyers. The author has analysed the text of Chapter Four of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which covers Intellectual Property Rights, and the text of Methodical Guidelines, regarding their implementation, published by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation which is aimed at improving the level of legal competence of businesspeople. The author shows that in this type of legal metatext, when interpreting the intention of the legislator the most common reformulation methods are exemplification, renaming, syntactic simplification and rearrangement, enumeration and precision.