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Part of
Unlocking the History of English: Pragmatics, prescriptivism and text types
Edited by Luisella Caon, Moragh S. Gordon and Thijs Porck
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 364] 2024
► pp. 101–128

Is legal discourse really “outside the ravages of time”?

A diachronic analysis of nominalizations in British judicial decisions

| University of Oviedo

This study explores word-based nominalizations between 1535 and 2021 in legal decisions. Nominalizations and the passive are usually proscribed in contemporary legal drafting manuals. Recent research has shown that there has been a notable reduction in the use of the passive, probably aided by campaigns promoting a plainer language accessible to the general public. However, nominalizations have received scarce attention in the literature to date. The data here show that nominalizations, especially those formed with Romance suffixes, tend to increase in frequency and productivity over time in legal decisions, probably acting as a compensation for the decrease in the use of the passive voice, or motivated by a general increase in the nominal density of legal decisions.

Keywords: nominalizations, derivational morphology, legal discourse, judicial decisions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Nominalizations in legal discourse
  • 3.Sources and methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overall distribution
    • 4.2Diachronic distribution
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 4 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.364.05rod
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