Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English

Download or read book Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English written by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and published by Lodz Studies in Language. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.