| Summary: | In S v Molefe the presiding officer determines the meaning of the
word "disposal" at the hand of two criteria, namely visibility and
permanence; this means a body has to be permanently out of
sight to be considered disposed of. He applies these two criteria
in order to conclude if the accused is guilty of concealing the
birth of her child by disposing of its body. In doing so, the court
no longer interprets the word as an everyday word but turns it
into a legal term. This note questions the linguistic soundness of
the criteria by investigating how language structures space, and
how these constructions relate to the word "disposal". In order to
scrutinise the criteria, a text analysis was carried out by applying
Talmy's ideas surrounding prepositions in structuring space and
movement. Connected to this is the semantic difference
between the words "seeing" and "looking": seeing is a sensory
act, whereas looking is a cognitive one. In keeping with the
contested word's status as a legal term, the difference between
seeing and looking aids in formulating two new criteria. Courts
may consider assessing whether disposal took place on the
grounds of containment and movement; for instance, has the
body been moved from one location to another and is the body
being contained within another object like a bucket, a wooden
box or a suitcase?
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