Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English: A Corpus-Based Study

ISBN-13: 9783631615812 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 280 str.

Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara

Opis

Translators, law students or legal professionals who begin to deal with legal language face a bewildering variety of legal writings. Even though legal language has been examined from a multitude of perspectives, there are virtually no studies explicitly addressing variation in legal English in terms of recurrent linguistic patterns. This book is a first step towards filling this gap. It provides a corpus-based linguistic description of variation among several selected legal genres, including vocabulary distribution and use (keywords), extended lexical expressions (lexical bundles), and lexico-syntactic co-occurrence patterns (multidimensional analysis). The findings are interpreted in functional terms in an attempt to provide an overall characterization of the most commonly encountered types of legal language.

Spis treści

Contents: Variation in legal language - Register and genre perspectives on legal language - Design and construction of the American Law Corpus - Vocabulary distribution and use across different legal genres - Multiword patterns in legal genres - Variation across different genres and disciplines.

O autorze

Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski received his MA in English Studies and his PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Lódz (Poland), where he now lectures on English Language and Linguistics. His research interests include legal linguistics, corpus linguistics, register variation and genre analysis, specialist translation and terminology.