Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
What is it about?
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.
Why is it important?
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 and parliamentary discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation. In the context of the European Union and the institutions therein, legal and parliamentary discourse occupy a privileged position as objects of study due to their capacity to reflect important linguistic and social changes, as well as significant differences in the legal systems of the various member states.