Every now and then I get asked to explain the usage of certain unfamiliar phrases like the ellipsis “that of” that can make abstruse legalese even tougher to comprehend to nonlawyers and nonnative English speakers in general.
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This was certainly the case with an old Supreme Court jurisprudence about “consignation” (G.R. No. L-8496, April 25, 1956) that Forum member Justine A. brought to my attention recently: “(T)he disagreement between a lessor and a lessee as to the amount of rent to be paid by a lessee cannot be decided
in an action of consignation but
in that of forcible entry and unlawful detainer that the lessor institutes when the lessee refuses to pay the lessor the rents that he has fixed for the property.”
To help make things easier to grasp here, let me first give the definition in Philippine jurisprudence of the term “consignation”: “It is the act of depositing the thing due with the court or judicial authorities whenever the creditor cannot accept or refuses to accept payment and generally requires a prior tender of payment. The deposit has to be made with the judicial authority before whom the tender of payment and the announcement of the consignation shall be proved. All interested parties are to be notified of the consignation.”
I assured Justine A. that the grammar and syntax of that jurisprudence is scrupulously correct and beyond reproach, but that not being a lawyer, I got confused by its rather longwinded, complicated justification for how the court rules in such cases.
It’s not easy to understand what the court meant when it said it had to decide on the matter not “in an action of consignation” but “in an action of forcible entry and unlawful detainer…” I think the sense of that statement would have been much clearer had the preposition “as” been used instead of “in,” as follows: “The disagreement between a lessor and a lessee as to the amount of rent to be paid by a lessee cannot be decided
as an action of consignation but
as an action of forcible entry and unlawful detainer...”
The problem though is that for the sake of brevity, the court had decided not to repeat the phrase “in an action of” for the second course of action it described, instead replacing it with the elliptical two-word phrase “that of.” The result is this shorter but iffy, slippery statement that can confound readers not conversant with how “that of” works: “The disagreement between a lessor and a lessee as to the amount of rent to be paid by a lessee cannot be decided
in an action of consignation but
in that of forcible entry and unlawful detainer…”
I suppose it has become more obvious now, as I pointed out earlier, that the jurisprudence in question gets much clearer when the preposition “in” is simply replaced with “as” in describing the two parallel actions involved.
Recall that in English, the ellipsis “that of” is useful for concisely comparing not two objects or things themselves but an attribute, possession, or part of theirs, as in “
The processor of your laptop is more powerful than
that of mine.” This particular comparative construction is, of course, an elliptical, more succinct version of this sentence: “
The processor of your laptop is more powerful than
the processor of your laptop.” The pointing pronoun “that” replaces the name of the thing whose attribute, possession, or part is being compared with that of the other, and the pronoun “mine” replaces the name of the other thing involved in the comparison.
It admittedly takes lots of practice to use the ellipsis “that of” just right, and I’m afraid that this didn’t happen in the case of the jurisprudence brought to my attention here.
(Next:
A student’s travails in modular distance learning) March 18, 2021
This essay, 2,036th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the March 11, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
,© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. It is an elaboration and more detailed grammatical analysis of my reply to Forum member Justine Aragones's inquiry about the usage of the ellipsis “that of” in Philippine jurisprudence as posted in the Forum last March 1, 2021.Read this article online in
The Manila Times:
“Making sense of abstruse legalese”To listen to the audio version of this article, click the encircled double triangle logo in its online posting in
The Manila Times.
