Overview

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.Recipient of the 2021 Book Award from the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics (AESLA)

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9789027202352

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As the leitmotif of the current collection is variation in legal discourse, each chapter applies its own lens to specific linguistic items in a diverse spectrum of legal genres either cross-linguistically or diachronically. To this end, these endeavours not only successfully interpret the historicist dynamics of the individual legal genres, but also prompt social accountability towards law enforcement. In addition, the studies of temporal-spatial variations incorporate morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, representing a holistic landscape of language evolution. In this sense, how legal language evolves is compatible with the evolution of language in general and to some extent can be generalised to variations in other genres. Last but not least, the excellent introduction and application of `ever more sophisticated computational tools' has transcended the `original scope to encompass a much broader range of topics and methodologies' (p. 17). Throughout the book, a variety of auto-annotated corpus tools, language processers and statistical computer software are deployed to cater for the objectives of each study. Readability is enhanced with clearly illustrated tables, diagrams and figures, as well as with updates on technical innovations in corpus linguistics. -- Zhiying Xin and Jiawei Wang, Xiamen University, PRC, in The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 26(1), 2019

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