CITIZENSHIP ACT (591) OF GHANA AS A LOGIC THEOREM AND ITS SEMANTIC IMPLICATIONS

This paper presents excerpts of the natural text of the Citizenship Act of the Republic of Ghana, ACT 2000 (591), as a logic theorem in First Order Logic (FOL) language. The formalism of this piece of law is done to allow for semantic analysis of the text by machines. The results of this research also deals with the problem of ambiguities in the legal text, and reveals the semantic consequence of the natural construction or textual structure of the piece of law; one major problem of the semantics of legal text has been the problem of ambiguities, which largely affects interpretations that are alluded to legal statements. Some constructed sentences sometimes do not reflect the semantic intentions of the composers of the sentences, due to inherent ambiguities or technical faults in the structure of some parts of the statements. The formalism of the Act in this paper provides logical proofs and deductions which are asserted to establish clarity and to reveal semantic errors, or otherwise preserve the semantic intentions of the Act.