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Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
Edited by Teresa Fanego and Paula Rodríguez-Puente
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 91] 2019
► pp. 79–104

Chapter 4
Part-of-speech patterns in legal genres

Text-internal dynamics from a corpus-based perspective

| University of Navarra

Four corpora constructed from different genre families in business law (academic texts, case law, legal documents, and legislation) are analysed in terms of key parts of speech. The differences between them show that legal academic writing and case law tend to follow patterns comparable to argumentative texts elsewhere, while documents and legislation show unusual patterns of cohesion and modality. These phenomena are related to the functional requirements of the genres in question, and to disciplinary conventions.

Keywords: parts of speech, business law, keyness, legal genres, phraseology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus and method
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Overview of differences
    • 3.2Key features in all four corpora
      • 3.2.1Singular and plural possessive nouns
    • 3.3Key features in Academic and Cases
      • 3.3.1Academic and Cases: VVZ (third person singular present)
      • 3.3.2Academic and Cases: IN/that and WDT
    • 3.4Key features in Documents and Legislation
      • 3.4.1Documents and Legislation: CC (coordinating conjunctions)
        • 3.4.1.1And
        • 3.4.1.2Or
      • 3.4.2Documents and Legislation: VVN (past participles)
      • 3.4.3Documents: MD (modal verbs)
      • 3.4.4Legislation: WPZ (possessive wh-pronoun)
      • 3.4.5Documents: VB (be, base form)
  • 4.Summing up
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 6 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91.04bre
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