Genre-based syntactic account of legal English – a pilot study

Abstract

The paper aims to outline a pilot of the research into genre-based syntactic characteristics of legal language. A brief account of stylistic subclassification of legal language is followed by outlining most frequently mentioned syntactic features of legal English in literature which will be verified and/or challenged in the intended research. The selected parameters that are tested in this pilot study include the length of sentences, word-count per sentence, internal composition of sentences, and nominalization trends in legal English focusing on the proportion of finite and non-finite dependent clauses and their functional syntactic distribution. The future corpus to be compiled will be composed of different genres of the English law of which the first two are analyzed in the present paper, namely written transcript of an oral witness examination by the judge and an appellate judgment of the Court of Appeal. The partial results found in the present research confirm the relevant claims that generalizing observations on the grammar of legal English are inevitably superficial [3; 9; 21] as there are considerable differences across individual genres. The present pilot study revealed that the word count generating the 100-sentence corpora was 1.6 times higher in the Judgment, including the average word count per sentence which was 1.4 times higher than in the Transcript. Considerable differences were also found in relation to the occurrence of simple sentences (which was 7 times higher in the Transcript), and to the more complicated composition of multiple-clause sentences and stronger nominalization trends identified in the Judgment. The quantitative results are interpreted from a comparative perspective and are intended to serve as a benchmark for further research.