Chapter 4
Part-of-speech patterns in legal genres
Text-internal dynamics from a corpus-based perspective
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.
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)
- 3.4.2Documents 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
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Appendix
References (47)
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