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Sociocultural Dimensions of Lexis and Text in the History of English
Edited by Peter Petré, Hubert Cuyckens and Frauke D'hoedt
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 343] 2018
► pp. 103–124

Chapter 5
Old English wills

A genre study

Following Bhatia’s model of the ‘language of the law’, this paper treats wills and statutes as representatives of the genre ‘written formal legislative legal documents’. In an overview of the publications on Present-day English (PDE) legal writing, I point out that only statutes have been analyzed with corpus-linguistic methods (Section 1). Quantitative data about Old English (OE) legal genres do not exist; OE wills have been investigated only from a sociohistorical point of view (Section 2). This research situation requires a new approach to the study of OE wills, which is quantitative-qualitative and corpus-based. The corpus consists of 23 wills, amounting to 10,330 words (Section 3). Its analysis is presented in two parts. In the first part, a new model of the text structure of OE wills is proposed; its constituents are described and illustrated by examples. In the second part, the linguistic features sentence length, sentence structure in terms of the number of clauses per sentence and of the type and position of subordinate clauses in complex sentences, pronominal reference to the testator, and the categories of tense, mood, modality, and voice of the verbal syntagm are analyzed. The quantitative results are compared to the corresponding figures of PDE statutes. This comparison yields two sets of linguistic properties; one set is genre-specific, the other is period-specific (Section 4). In Section 5, the results of the paper are summarized, and a future research agenda is derived from them.

Keywords: legal documents, OE wills, corpus, statutes, genre, text structure, linguistic features, genre-specific, period-specific
Article outline
  • 1.Legal language
  • 2.Old English legal writing
  • 3.A new approach to research on OE wills
    • 3.1Method
    • 3.2Data
  • 4.Corpus analysis
    • 4.1Text structure
      • 4.1.1The testator identification
      • 4.1.2The dispositions
      • 4.1.3Address to the testator’s lord
      • 4.1.4The sanction
      • 4.1.5The list of witnesses
    • 4.2Linguistic features
      • 4.2.1Sentence length
      • 4.2.2The number of clauses per sentence
      • 4.2.3Type and position of subordinate clauses
      • 4.2.4Pronominal testator reference
      • 4.2.5The verbal syntagm
  • 5.Summary and conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpus
Published online: 4 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.343.05moe
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Moessner, Lilo
2020. Old English law-codes. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 21:1 ► pp. 28 ff. DOI logo
Timofeeva, Olga
2022. The Art of Dying: Making a Will in Old English and Its Sociolinguistic Context. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 57:1 ► pp. 109 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 13], DOI logo

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