Legal Pragmatics
Editors
The volume Legal Pragmatics is a contribution to the interface between language and law. It looks at how the principles of language use can be beneficial to clarifying legal issues, its twelve chapters (together with the Introduction) offering a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the area of legal pragmatics. The four chapters in the first section are devoted to historical pragmatics and take a diachronic look at old courtroom records. Written legal language is also the focus of the four chapters in the next section, dealing with the pragmatics of modern legal writing. The chapters in the third section, devoted to modern legal language, touch upon both the discourse in the courtroom and in police investigation. Finally, the two chapters in the last section on legal discourse and multilingualism address a topic very relevant to the modern era of globalisation -- the position of legal discourse in multilingual contexts.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 288] 2018. viii, 278 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
-
IntroductionDennis Kurzon and Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky | pp. 1–18
-
Part 1. Historical pragmatics
-
Chapter 1. Pleading for life: Narrative patterns within legal petitions (Salem, 1692)Kathleen L. Doty | pp. 21–40
-
Chapter 2. “How came you not to cry out?”: Pragmatic effects of negative questioning in child rape trials in the Old Bailey Proceedings 1730–1798Alison Johnson | pp. 41–64
-
Chapter 3. Implicatures in Early Modern English courtroom recordsBarbara Kryk-Kastovsky | pp. 65–80
-
Chapter 4. Literal interpretation and political expediency: The case of Thomas MoreDennis Kurzon | pp. 81–98
-
Part 2. Pragmatics of legal writing and documents
-
Chapter 5. Making legal language clear to legal laypersonsSol Azuelos-Atias | pp. 101–116
-
Chapter 6. Interpreting or in legal textsJacqueline Visconti | pp. 117–130
-
Part 3. Discourse in the courtroom and in police investigation
-
Chapter 7. The nature of power and control in the interrogative patterns of selected Nigerian courtroom discourseOluwasola A. Aina, Anthony E. Anowu and Tunde Opeibi | pp. 133–156
-
Chapter 8. The language of Egyptian interrogations: A study of suspects’ resistance to implicatures and presuppositions in prosecution questionsNeveen Al Saeed | pp. 157–180
-
Chapter 9. Achieving influence through negotiation: An argument for developing pragmatic awarenessDawn Archer, Rebecca Smithson and Ian Kennedy | pp. 181–202
-
Chapter 10. “I really don’t know because I’m stupid”: Unpacking suggestibility in investigative interviewsIkuko Nakane | pp. 203–228
-
Part 4. Legal discourse and multilingualism
-
Chapter 11. On the balance between invariance and context-dependence: Legal concepts and their environmentsTarja Salmi-Tolonen | pp. 231–256
-
Chapter 12. Contextuality of interpretation in non-monolingual jurisdictions: The Canadian experienceDiana Yankova | pp. 257–276
-
Legal pragmatics - subject index proposal | pp. 277–278
“As the book is innovative and a notable contribution to the fields of Pragmatics and Legal Language, outlining several elements covered in pragmatics and how they may serve as analytical tools for examining language in a forensic setting, Legal Pragmatics comes highly recommended.”
Leanne Victoria Bartley, University of Granada, in Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 139, 2019
“As a whole, ‘Legal Pragmatics’ provides an insightful overview of the applications of pragmatics to various legal contexts. Each chapter approaches a relevant issue and contributes not only to the wider field of language and law (or forensic linguistics), but also advances the practical applications of using principles of linguistics to reveal, investigate, and suggest solutions to pressing issues. The global aspect of this book truly makes it a valuable resource to linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and law enforcement personnel around the world.”
Dakota Wing, York University, Toronto, on Linguist List 30.279 (17 January 2019)
“A merger of legal linguistics and CDA opens promising methodological avenues, which make a researcher move from an abstract legal text, or genre, to its tangible social consequences. And it is this fresh perspective that I view as a major asset of the volume. The book can gain multiple audiences, including legal linguists, discourse analysts, legal philosophers and practitioners. Various national legal contexts discussed in the volume, which embrace Europe, North America and Africa, might appeal particularly to specialists in comparative pragmatics and comparative law.”
Tatiana Dubrovskaya, Penza State University, Russia, in Discourse Studies 21(4), 2019.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
STANCIU, Anca Monica
2023. A Methodological Approach to Legal and Administrative Translation. ANALELE UNIVERSITĂȚII DIN CRAIOVA SERIA ȘTIINȚE FILOLOGICE LIMBI STRĂINE APLICATE 2023:1 ► pp. 312 ff. 
Galdia, Marcus
2022. FOUNDATIONS OF PRAGMATIC LEGAL LINGUISTICS. Comparative Legilinguistics 51 ► pp. 241 ff.
Fanego, Teresa & Paula Rodríguez-Puente
2019. Chapter 1. “Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?” English legal discourse past and present. In Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 91], ► pp. 1 ff.
Li, Jian & Yuxiu Sun
2018. Presuppositions as discourse strategies in court examinations. International Journal of Legal Discourse 3:2 ► pp. 197 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009030: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Pragmatics