Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse edited by Teresa Fanego Paula Rodríguez-Puente S t u d i e s i n C o r p u s L i n g u i s t i c s 91 JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse Studies in Corpus Linguistics (SCL) issn 1388-0373 SCL focuses on the use of corpora throughout language study, the development of a quantitative approach to linguistics, the design and use of new tools for processing language texts, and the theoretical implications of a data-rich discipline. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/scl General Editor Founding Editor Ute Römer Elena Tognini-Bonelli Georgia State University The Tuscan Word Centre/University of Siena Advisory Board Laurence Anthony Susan Hunston Waseda University University of Birmingham Antti Arppe Michaela Mahlberg University of Alberta University of Birmingham Michael Barlow Anna Mauranen University of Auckland University of Helsinki Monika Bednarek Andrea Sand University of Sydney University of Trier Tony Berber Sardinha Benedikt Szmrecsanyi Catholic University of São Paulo Catholic University of Leuven Douglas Biber Elena Tognini-Bonelli Northern Arizona University The Tuscan Word Centre/University of Siena Marina Bondi Yukio Tono University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Jonathan Culpeper Martin Warren Lancaster University The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Sylviane Granger Stefanie Wulff University of Louvain University of Florida Stefan Th. Gries University of California, Santa Barbara Volume 91 Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse Edited by Teresa Fanego and Paula Rodríguez-Puente Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse Edited by Teresa Fanego University of Santiago de Compostela Paula Rodríguez-Puente University of Oviedo John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Cover design: Françoise Berserik Cover illustration from original painting Random Order by Lorenzo Pezzatini, Florence, 1996. doi 10.1075/scl.91 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress. isbn 978 90 272 0235 2 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6283 7 (e-book) © 2019 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com Table of contents Acknowledgements vii chapter 1 “Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?” English legal discourse past and present 1 Teresa Fanego & Paula Rodríguez-Puente Part I: Cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation chapter 2 English and Italian land contracts: A cross-linguistic analysis 25 Giuliana Diani chapter 3 Conditionals in spoken courtroom and parliamentary discourse in English, French, and Spanish: A contrastive analysis 51 Cristina Lastres-López chapter 4 Part-of-speech patterns in legal genres: Text-internal dynamics from a corpus-based perspective 79 Ruth Breeze chapter 5 A comparison of lexical bundles in spoken courtroom language across time, registers, and varieties 105 Randi Reppen & Meishan Chen chapter 6 “It is not just a fact that the law requires this, but it is a reasonable fact”: Using the Noun that-pattern to explore stance construction in legal writing 123 Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski vi Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse Part II: Diachronic variation chapter 7 Are law reports an ‘agile’ or an ‘uptight’ register? Tracking patterns of historical change in the use of colloquial and complexity features 149 Douglas Biber & Bethany Gray chapter 8 Interpersonality in legal written discourse: A diachronic analysis of personal pronouns in law reports, 1535 to present 171 Paula Rodríguez-Puente chapter 9 The evolution of a legal genre: Rhetorical moves in British patent specifications, 1711 to 1860 201 Nicholas Groom & Jack Grieve chapter 10 The representation of citizens and monarchy in Acts of Parliament in 1800 to 2000: Identifying social roles through collocations 235 Anu Lehto chapter 11 Drinking and crime: Negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse, 1720 to 1913 261 Claudia Claridge Name index 287 Subject index 291 Acknowledgements The idea for a volume on English legal discourse arose when the two editors were involved in the compilation of the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535– 1999 (CHELAR),1 a database employed as a source of evidence in some of the chapters herein. The positive reception of the corpus by the academic community prompted the organisation of a workshop on corpora of legal English and their research possibilities; it was held in May 2017 at Charles University in Prague, during ICAME 38, and served as the springboard for the studies in the present vol- ume. Additional chapters were contributed by several invited scholars in the field. We would like to thank the audience at the workshop for their helpful com- ments during the discussion periods, and the authors for both their chapters and their cooperation during the editing process. We are also greatly indebted to the following colleagues who acted as anonymous external reviewers: Łucja Biel, Sil- via Cacchiani, Kathleen L. Doty, Pierfranca Forchini, Christoph Hafner, Paul Jen- nings, Andreas H. Jucker, Joanna Kopaczyk, Davide Mazzi, Minna Nevala, María Ángeles Orts-Llopis, Carlos Prado-Alonso, Gianluca Pontrandolfo, Maura Ratia, Elena Seoane, Robert Shoemaker, Erik Smitterberg, Maria Svensson, Aleksan- dar Trklja, Jukka Tyrkkö, Marcia Veirano Pinto, Christopher Williams and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza. Thanks are also due to Ute Römer, the Series Editor, for her encouragement, wisdom, and continuous support, as well as to Kees Vaes and the editorial staff at John Benjamins for their speedy responses to our many queries. Last but by no means least, we acknowledge the collaboration of our friends and colleagues at the research unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization of the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the generous financial support of the European Regional Development Fund, the Spanish Ministry of Innovation, Sci- ence and Universities (grant FFI2017-86884-P), and the Regional Government of Galicia (grants ED431B 2017/12 and ED431D 2017/09). .  Rodríguez-Puente, Paula, Fanego, Teresa, López-Couso, María José, Méndez-Naya, Belén & Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma (compilers). 2016. Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535– 1999. Santiago de Compostela: Research Unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Gram- maticalization, University of Santiago de Compostela. ISBN: 978–84–608–8006–6. chapter 1 “Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?” English legal discourse past and present Teresa Fanego & Paula Rodríguez-Puente University of Santiago de Compostela / University of Oviedo Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? […] Hum! This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases […] than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet V.i.98–110) 1.  Introduction In a seminal paper published three decades ago, Vijay Bhatia (1987) drew atten- tion to the dramatic expansion of interest in legal English that had then begun to take place among linguists of all theoretical persuasions. He saw this as a result of developments in three disciplines, namely: (1) in linguistics proper, where the inclusion of pragmatics in the study of lan- guage has encouraged linguists to look for the use of language in real life settings, (2) in applied linguistics, where the main concern has been to design and teach language support courses for academic as well as professional legal courses, and (3) in social science disciplines, where legal language has become the object of sociological inquiry because it is increasingly being recognised as the vehicle for social action. (Bhatia 1987: 227) The present chapter takes Bhatia’s observations as a point of departure and attempts to offer a survey of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the large field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in register analysis and register variation (see Ghadessy 1993; Diller 2001; Biber & Conrad 2009; among many others), and https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91.01fan © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company