It seems like the central claim of the study is that there is an increased use of center embeddings in legal texts in comparison to non-legal texts and casuals peach. I'm seeing a lot of debating and presentations of opinions about various aspects of legalese in the comments, but the number of center embeddings in a document is measurable, and is in no way associated with clarity, or precision. It is known that beyond one or two center embeddings, most people find a sentence incomprehensible. There is no way that a sentence like "The dog the cat the rat chased ate saw the man wink." is more clear than some semi-paraphrase, which does not use center embeddings, such as "The rat chased the cat who ate the dog who saw the man wink." It seems reasonable that the only explanation the researchers could find for such behavior is that it seemed to have some sociological value in invoking authority. There is no sense in which center embeddings help to avoid lexical ambiguity. They are simply difficult to parse.
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