Table Of ContentCorpus-based Research
on Variation in English
Legal Discourse
edited by
Teresa Fanego
Paula Rodríguez-Puente
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91
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
Studies in Corpus Linguistics (SCL)
issn 1388-0373
SCL focuses on the use of corpora throughout language study, the development
of a quantitative approach to linguistics, the design and use of new tools for
processing language texts, and the theoretical implications of a data-rich discipline.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/scl
General Editor Founding Editor
Ute Römer Elena Tognini-Bonelli
Georgia State University The Tuscan Word Centre/University of Siena
Advisory Board
Laurence Anthony Susan Hunston
Waseda University University of Birmingham
Antti Arppe Michaela Mahlberg
University of Alberta University of Birmingham
Michael Barlow Anna Mauranen
University of Auckland University of Helsinki
Monika Bednarek Andrea Sand
University of Sydney University of Trier
Tony Berber Sardinha Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Catholic University of São Paulo Catholic University of Leuven
Douglas Biber Elena Tognini-Bonelli
Northern Arizona University The Tuscan Word Centre/University of Siena
Marina Bondi Yukio Tono
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Jonathan Culpeper Martin Warren
Lancaster University The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Sylviane Granger Stefanie Wulff
University of Louvain University of Florida
Stefan Th. Gries
University of California, Santa Barbara
Volume 91
Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
Edited by Teresa Fanego and Paula Rodríguez-Puente
Corpus-based Research
on Variation
in English Legal Discourse
Edited by
Teresa Fanego
University of Santiago de Compostela
Paula Rodríguez-Puente
University of Oviedo
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Cover design: Françoise Berserik
Cover illustration from original painting Random Order
by Lorenzo Pezzatini, Florence, 1996.
doi 10.1075/scl.91
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress.
isbn 978 90 272 0235 2 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6283 7 (e-book)
© 2019 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Acknowledgements vii
chapter 1
“Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?” English legal
discourse past and present 1
Teresa Fanego & Paula Rodríguez-Puente
Part I: Cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation
chapter 2
English and Italian land contracts: A cross-linguistic analysis 25
Giuliana Diani
chapter 3
Conditionals in spoken courtroom and parliamentary discourse in
English, French, and Spanish: A contrastive analysis 51
Cristina Lastres-López
chapter 4
Part-of-speech patterns in legal genres: Text-internal dynamics from a
corpus-based perspective 79
Ruth Breeze
chapter 5
A comparison of lexical bundles in spoken courtroom language
across time, registers, and varieties 105
Randi Reppen & Meishan Chen
chapter 6
“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 123
Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski
vi Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
Part II: Diachronic variation
chapter 7
Are law reports an ‘agile’ or an ‘uptight’ register? Tracking
patterns of historical change in the use of colloquial and
complexity features 149
Douglas Biber & Bethany Gray
chapter 8
Interpersonality in legal written discourse: A diachronic analysis of
personal pronouns in law reports, 1535 to present 171
Paula Rodríguez-Puente
chapter 9
The evolution of a legal genre: Rhetorical moves in British
patent specifications, 1711 to 1860 201
Nicholas Groom & Jack Grieve
chapter 10
The representation of citizens and monarchy in Acts of Parliament in
1800 to 2000: Identifying social roles through collocations 235
Anu Lehto
chapter 11
Drinking and crime: Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse,
1720 to 1913 261
Claudia Claridge
Name index 287
Subject index 291
Acknowledgements
The idea for a volume on English legal discourse arose when the two editors were
involved in the compilation of the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535–
1999 (CHELAR),1 a database employed as a source of evidence in some of the
chapters herein. The positive reception of the corpus by the academic community
prompted the organisation of a workshop on corpora of legal English and their
research possibilities; it was held in May 2017 at Charles University in Prague,
during ICAME 38, and served as the springboard for the studies in the present vol-
ume. Additional chapters were contributed by several invited scholars in the field.
We would like to thank the audience at the workshop for their helpful com-
ments during the discussion periods, and the authors for both their chapters and
their cooperation during the editing process. We are also greatly indebted to the
following colleagues who acted as anonymous external reviewers: Łucja Biel, Sil-
via Cacchiani, Kathleen L. Doty, Pierfranca Forchini, Christoph Hafner, Paul Jen-
nings, Andreas H. Jucker, Joanna Kopaczyk, Davide Mazzi, Minna Nevala, María
Ángeles Orts-Llopis, Carlos Prado-Alonso, Gianluca Pontrandolfo, Maura Ratia,
Elena Seoane, Robert Shoemaker, Erik Smitterberg, Maria Svensson, Aleksan-
dar Trklja, Jukka Tyrkkö, Marcia Veirano Pinto, Christopher Williams and Nuria
Yáñez-Bouza.
Thanks are also due to Ute Römer, the Series Editor, for her encouragement,
wisdom, and continuous support, as well as to Kees Vaes and the editorial staff at
John Benjamins for their speedy responses to our many queries. Last but by no
means least, we acknowledge the collaboration of our friends and colleagues at
the research unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization of the
University of Santiago de Compostela, and the generous financial support of the
European Regional Development Fund, the Spanish Ministry of Innovation, Sci-
ence and Universities (grant FFI2017-86884-P), and the Regional Government of
Galicia (grants ED431B 2017/12 and ED431D 2017/09).
. Rodríguez-Puente, Paula, Fanego, Teresa, López-Couso, María José, Méndez-Naya, Belén
& Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma (compilers). 2016. Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535–
1999. Santiago de Compostela: Research Unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Gram-
maticalization, University of Santiago de Compostela. ISBN: 978–84–608–8006–6.
chapter 1
“Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?”
English legal discourse past and present
Teresa Fanego & Paula Rodríguez-Puente
University of Santiago de Compostela / University of Oviedo
Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his
quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? […] Hum! This fellow might be
in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his
double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his
recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no
more of his purchases […] than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures?
(W. Shakespeare, Hamlet V.i.98–110)
1. Introduction
In a seminal paper published three decades ago, Vijay Bhatia (1987) drew atten-
tion to the dramatic expansion of interest in legal English that had then begun to
take place among linguists of all theoretical persuasions. He saw this as a result of
developments in three disciplines, namely:
(1) in linguistics proper, where the inclusion of pragmatics in the study of lan-
guage has encouraged linguists to look for the use of language in real life settings,
(2) in applied linguistics, where the main concern has been to design and teach
language support courses for academic as well as professional legal courses, and
(3) in social science disciplines, where legal language has become the object of
sociological inquiry because it is increasingly being recognised as the vehicle for
social action. (Bhatia 1987: 227)
The present chapter takes Bhatia’s observations as a point of departure and
attempts to offer a survey of the research carried out over the past thirty years
in the large field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been
influenced and shaped by developments in register analysis and register variation
(see Ghadessy 1993; Diller 2001; Biber & Conrad 2009; among many others), and
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91.01fan
© 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company
