Fanego Teresa, Rodríguez-Puente Paula (eds.) Corpus-Based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2019. — 304 p. — (Studies in Corpus Linguistics). — ISBN 9027202354, 9789027202352.This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.“Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?” English legal discourse past and present
Teresa Fanego & Paula Rodríguez-Puente
Cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation chapter
English and Italian land contracts: A cross-linguistic analysis
Giuliana Diani
Conditionals in spoken courtroom and parliamentary discourse in English, French, and Spanish: A contrastive analysis
Cristina Lastres-López
Part-of-speech patterns in legal genres: Text-internal dynamics from a corpus-based perspective
Ruth Breeze
A comparison of lexical bundles in spoken courtroom language across time, registers, and varieties
Randi Reppen & Meishan Chen
“It is not just a fact that the law requires this, but it is a reasonable fact”: Using the Noun that-pattern to explore stance construction in legal writing
Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowskivi Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
Diachronic variation
Are law reports an ‘agile’ or an ‘uptight’ register? Tracking patterns of historical change in the use of colloquial and complexity features
Douglas Biber & Bethany Gray
Interpersonality in legal written discourse: A diachronic analysis of personal pronouns in law reports, 1535 to present
Paula Rodríguez-Puente
The evolution of a legal genre: Rhetorical moves in British patent specifications, 1711 to 1860
Nicholas Groom & Jack Grieve
The representation of citizens and monarchy in Acts of Parliament in 1800 to 2000: Identifying social roles through collocations
Anu Lehto
Drinking and crime: Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse, 1720 to 1913
Claudia Claridge
Name index
Subject index 29