Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse

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)

Marijana Javornik Cubric, University of Zagreb, on Linguist List 30.4177, (5 November 2019):
Although the book covers difficult topics, it is written in a clear and concise language which makes it easy to understand. The editors made an excellent selection of contributions so that the volume coheres, it is informative and at times even amusing, particularly in its vivid final chapter, with actual examples of the language used by intoxicated persons in courtrooms. The volume can be recommended to anybody interested in legal language, but particularly to those involved in legal language research, because it encourages future corpora-based research on similar lines and could give young researchers valuable ideas about which direction to go.