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Part of
Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
Edited by Teresa Fanego and Paula Rodríguez-Puente
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 91] 2019
► pp. 23–50

Chapter 2
English and Italian land contracts

A cross-linguistic analysis

| Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Legal language has attracted increasing scholarly interest over the last three decades, and the importance of this field is constantly growing. The present chapter examines the textual and linguistic features of a type of legal text, contracts, and in particular land contracts, from a cross-linguistic perspective (English and Italian). Detailed consideration of the form and language of land contracts shows that they exhibit remarkable similarities in the two languages examined, but also differences in the handling of major linguistic strategies such as relativization, nominalization, binomials, or the resources employed to express deontic modality.

Keywords: cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, English, Italian, land contract
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.The textual structure of English and Italian land contracts
  • 4.On the language of land contracts: A comparison between English and Italian
    • 4.1Further properties of sentence and clause syntax
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91.02dia
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