There's been centuries of legal disputes, in both civil and criminal cases, and judges have over time through their rulings have influenced what is the acceptable wording to enforce whatever it is legislators intended for a particular law. When judges render a verdict, it becomes case law, and although that itself is regarded as part of the law, where there's ambiguity, over time, legislators have been prone to abrogate laws with more exact wording.
This is reflected in the tendency for judges to fall in groups that favour one way of interpretation over another, like Intentionalism, Purposivism, Textualism etc. The fact that statutory construction is something that is almost exclusively driven by judges themselves seems also pretty important when studying the language of the law and it's kind of absurd they ignore it in this study.