Of Legal Language

Oana Cogeanu-Haraga
 Text categorisations
• “types of texts or genres” (Trosborg 1997a:20): situation of use
language of the law (legal documents)
language of the courtroom
language in textbooks
lawyers’ communication
people talking about the law

• “text categories” (Borja Albi 2000:84–134): discursive situation

prescriptive texts
judicial texts
reference works
scholarly texts
law application texts

• “system of legal genres” (Bhatia 2006:6–7): communicative purpose

primary genre (legislation)
secondary genres (e.g. judgments, cases)
enabling (pedagogic) genres, academic and professional
target genres (e.g. contracts)
correlation of
legal function,
text and genre
(Prieto Ramos)

• law-making
• monitoring of
compliance
• adjudication
• ideal link legal theme or function – legal
discourse features – legal context of use
BUT
legal language is “the language of and related to
law and legal process”, including “language of
the law, language about law, and language used
in other legal communicative situations” (Cao
2007:9)
 Study of legal language
• external variation
• internal variation
• temporal variation
• cross-linguistic variation (Biel 2010:4)

Corpora based
Example:
Coulthard & Johnson 2007 on Legal English:
different distribution of grammatical items and lexical items
 Translationese
translation universals

• Mona Baker:
• explicitation,
• simplification and disambiguation
• normalisation/conservatism
• levelling out

• Andrew Chesterman:
• S-universals: lengthening of TTs compared to STs, interference, standardisation,
dialect normalisation, explicitation, sanitization, reduction of repetition, etc.
• T-universals: simplification, conventionalisation, normalisation, under-
representation of TL-specific items, etc.
 Legal discourse
legal text / legal language / legal setting

No legal terms out of legal (con)texts

Legal discourse = a form of specialised discourse

whereby the power of the law is expressed via the
three legal genres (legislative, executive, judicial)
through a network of legal texts
(Cogeanu 2020:81)