30.4177, Review: English; Discourse Analysis; Forensic Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Fanego, Rodríguez-Puente (2019)

Tue Nov 5 17:19:52 UTC 2019

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4177. Tue Nov 05 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.4177, Review: English; Discourse Analysis; Forensic Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Fanego, Rodríguez-Puente (2019)

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Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 12:19:34
From: Marijana Javornik Čubrić [mjavorni at pravo.hr]
Subject: Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1141.html

EDITOR: Teresa  Fanego
EDITOR: Paula  Rodríguez-Puente
TITLE: Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Corpus Linguistics 91
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Marijana Javornik Čubrić

SUMMARY

The book consists of 294 pages and has eleven chapters. It opens with an
introductory chapter written by the editors, Teresa Fanego and Paula
Rodriguez-Puente, and is thereafter divided into two parts entitled
''Cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation“ and ''Diachronic variation“. In
the opening chapter the authors refer to Vijay Bhatia's paper from 1987 in
which he explained the rapid growth of interest in legal English as a result
of developments in three disciplines, linguistics, applied linguistics and
social science disciplines; they explain that the book attempts to outline the
research carried out in the large field of legal discourse over the past
thirty years. The chapter offers a brief overview of law-related fields of
language study focusing on the development of the Plain Language Movement and
of forensic linguistics, register and genre perspectives on legal discourse,
previous research on legal language from diachronic and historical pragmatic
perspectives;  in its last section it introduces the ensuing chapters.

Part 1 comprises five chapters which present cross-linguistic studies, the
first of which is ''English and Italian land contracts: A cross-linguistic
analysis“. It is written by Giuliana Diani and it examines the textual and
linguistic features of English and Italian land contracts based on a
self-compiled corpus. The analysis shows remarkable similarities between
English and Italian contracts, but also points out that Italian contracts are
less formulaic and have fewer passives, nominalizations, binomials and
multinomials, while English contracts seem to be unaffected by the changes
towards modernisation and simplification advocated by the Plain Language
Movement. In Chapter 3 Cristina Lastres-López analyses if-conditionals in
English, French and Spanish courtroom and parliamentary discourse on the basis
of corpus evidence from various sources and shows that if-conditionals are
mostly used to express canonical conditions, but also function as
interpersonal and textual devices in all three languages. In Chapter 4
entitled “Part-of-speech patterns in legal genres: Text-internal dynamics from
a corpus-based perspective” Ruth Breeze examines four 500,000-word corpora
constructed from different families of genres in business law (academic texts,
case law, legal documents and legislation) in terms of key parts of speech.
Her analysis of 18 different parts of speech shows that the use of plural
possessive nouns is common across all legal genre families, but that academic
and case law texts much more frequently use relative clauses introduced by
which and that and the present tense, while legal documents and legislation
have distinctive patterns of cohesion achieved by listing and ellipsis and are
overall more formulaic. The next chapter, “A comparison of lexical bundles in
spoken courtroom language across time, registers and varieties” Randi Reppen
and Meishan Chen analyse diachronic, register and language varieties in spoken
courtroom language by identifying the fifty most frequent three-word bundles
in the 1994 American trial of O.J. Simpson and comparing them with lexical
bundles in Present Day English trials (1993) and Early Modern English trials
(1560-1760) as established by Culpeper and Kytö in 2010. The last chapter in
Part I by Stanislaw Goźdź-Roszkowski, “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” examines the construction of
stance through nouns in two legal genres, academic journals and judicial
opinions. The analysis shows numerous similarities in both genres, but points
out that ‘certainty’ nouns are more frequently found in judicial corpora.

Part II is devoted to diachronic variation and its opening chapter “Are law
reports an ‘agile’ or an ‘uptight’ register?” by Douglas Biber and Bethany
Gray considers to what extent have law reports adopted linguistic innovations
observed in other written registers (science research articles, newspaper
articles and fiction) and concludes that compared to other written registers
law reports have been relatively conservative and resistant to historical
change. In Chapter 8 Paula Rodríguez-Puente provides a diachronic analysis of
the use of personal pronouns in English law reports using the Corpus of
Historical English Law Reports 1535-1999 (CHELAR). The analysis proves that
law reports present significantly higher frequencies of first and second
person pronouns than other formal texts, and that in spite of being resistant
to historical change in many respects, law reports have evolved towards a
higher degree of involvement, interpersonality and subjectivity. Chapter 9
authored by Nicholas Groom and Jack Grieve and entitled “The evolution of a
legal genre. Rhetorical moves in British patent specifications, 1711 to 1860”
provides a diachronic corpus-based analysis of the British patent
specification. In Chapter 10, “The representation of citizens and monarchy in
Acts of Parliament in 1800 to 2000” Anu Lehto investigates collocates
associated with citizens and monarchy, as they can reveal meanings associated
with words, and traces their semantic preferences and prosodies, arguing that
their portrayals are related to developments in the socio-historical context
and legislation. The data covers different layers of citizens, as the corpus
of about 290,000 words contains acts on the poor, children, women, employers
and employees and vagabonds, and the analysis concludes that the role of the
citizens considerably improved in the period covered by the data. The
concluding chapter “Drinking and crime. Negotiating intoxication in courtroom
discourse, 1720 to 1913” by Claudia Claridge examines how drunkenness is
presented in courtroom speech by focusing on words which mean ‘drunk’. The
data basis is the Old Bailey Corpus 2.0, a 24.4-million-word corpus drawn from
the proceedings of the Old Bailey (London’s central criminal court).  

EVALUATION

Bhatia’s statement from 1987 about the dramatic expansion of interest in legal
English seems to be more true and relevant than ever. Due to specific
characteristics of Legal English (archaisms, borrowings, specific
collocations, the use of legal doublets, a special way of using modal verbs,
passivization, nominalization and subordination), it is a challenging and
difficult area of study. As it is a language for special purpose that is
clearly not used only by the members of the legal profession, but that 
affects everybody as law governs all areas of social life, every citizen
should be able to understand it. Therefore the Plain Language Movement is
particularly important, and it has become successful in recent years. Although
it is generally considered that the Plain English for law movement began in 
1970s, many efforts to make English for Law plainer have been made for
centuries. The first legislative attempt to make legal procedure more
understandable to common people dates back to 1362, when Parliament passed the
Statute of Pleading which demanded that English should become the language of
the court instead of French, but that documents should continue to be written
in Latin. David Melinkoff’s book The Language of the Law from 1963 was the
first book that clearly pointed to many absurdities connected with Legal
English and it strongly influenced the Plain English for Law movement. It
should be mentioned that Melinkoff, as well as many important authors that
followed him in this area, was not a linguist, but a lawyer. He described the
language of the law as “wordy, unclear, pompous and dull” (Melinkoff, p. 24),
and provided numerous examples of legal documents and rules which are
extremely difficult to understand. After the publication of Melinkoff’s book,
in  the 1970s the Plain English for Law movement gained momentum. Supporters
of the movement claim that lawyers continue to use outdated phrases and ritual
language out of habit, and that they refuse to accept the fact that times
change. Accepting changes and adapting to them lies at the very heart of the
Plain English for Law movement. As explained by M. Asprey, a prominent author
in the field, also a lawyer by profession: “We can no longer be content to
rely on the old words, the old clauses, the old precedents. Things have
changed. The public perception of lawyers has changed. We are no longer seen
as the learned custodians of unknowable secrets. We are no longer immune to
challenge on our own ground. Our clients are asking questions. They are
demanding the right to understand the advice we give and they want to be able
to read the documents we draft for them.“ (Asprey, 3-4). Because of that, the
recent research in the vast field of legal discourse is important and
relevant. This book is a valuable contribution to it, because it deals with
two crucial areas of study; in its Part I it examines different genres, 
emphasising the enormous diversity of legal discourse and pointing to its
similarities and differences in different languages. By analysing the
differences between modern and historical legal language in its Part II, it
clearly demonstrates that a better insight into the historical development of
legal language enables a better understanding of the ways in which it is still
changing today.

Although the book covers difficult topics, it is written in a clear and
concise language which makes it easy to understand. The editors made an
excellent selection of contributions so that the volume coheres, it is
informative and at times even amusing, particularly in its vivid final
chapter, with actual examples of the language used by intoxicated persons in
courtrooms.  

The volume can be recommended to anybody interested in legal language, but
particularly to those involved in legal language research, because it
encourages future corpora-based research on similar lines and could give young
researchers valuable ideas about which direction to go. 

REFERENCES

Asprey, Michèle, 2003. Plain Language for Lawyers, Third edition, The
Federation Press, Sydney.

Melinkoff, David, 1963. The Language of the Law, Little, Brown and Co.,
Boston&Toronto.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marijana Javornik Čubrić is a Senior Lecturer of Legal English at the Faculty
of Law, University of Zagreb. She holds a PhD in legal linguistics and has
authored several textbooks in the field of LSP.

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