The importance of being patterned: Old and new perspectives on legal phraseology

Gianluca Pontrandolfo
University of Trieste
Table of contents

1.Introduction

The term phraseology is generally associated with a number of concepts, each of them focusing on a specific element that contributes to its definition. Among these terms are, for example, formulaicity and patternedness: they stress the fact that phraseology has to do with a pervasive feature of both spoken and written language, namely, repetitiveness. As a matter of fact, we speak like other people, we say things that have been said before (Hopper 1998Hopper, Paul 1998 “Emergent Grammar.” In The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Linguistic Structure, edited by Michael Tomasello, 155–175. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar, 159). Formulaicity refers to utterances which are similar to previous utterances and to the consideration that “anything that is said has been said in something like that form before” (Hopper 1998Hopper, Paul 1998 “Emergent Grammar.” In The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Linguistic Structure, edited by Michael Tomasello, 155–175. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar, 165), which is also the idea at the basis of machine translation: any phrase that is written has probably been written before, and translated, and the original and the paired translations are likely to be somewhere on the Internet (Bellos 2011Bellos, David 2011 Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. New York: Faber & Faber.Google Scholar, 253–254 in MacKenzie and Kayman 2016MacKenzie, Ian and Martin A. Kayman 2016 “Introduction: Formulaicity and Creativity in Language and Literature.” European Journal of English Studies 20(1):1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1). Languages are a massive inventory of formulaic expressions.

Similar to this concept is the idea that phraseology has to do with prefabricated language which evokes terms, such as: petrification, fossilization, prefabrication, fixedness, standardization, frozenness, embeddedness. The idea behind the use of these words is that phraseology has to do with constructions that have become conventionalized and, due to their interrelated pairings of form and function, are now highly fixed. Other terms associated with phraseology are rituals, conventionalism, conservatism, which refer to the fact that its use may consist in a vast collection of hand-me downs that reach back in time to the beginnings of language (or of a Language for Special Purposes, LSP) (Hopper 1998Hopper, Paul 1998 “Emergent Grammar.” In The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Linguistic Structure, edited by Michael Tomasello, 155–175. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar, 159). This allows for the association of another term, namely frequency, to the conceptualization of phraseology: to be considered as such, a phraseological unit has to meet the criterion of being frequently used in a type of text or language variety.

Many phraseological units exist because they “sound good” (MacKenzie and Kayman 2016MacKenzie, Ian and Martin A. Kayman 2016 “Introduction: Formulaicity and Creativity in Language and Literature.” European Journal of English Studies 20(1):1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1) which is in line with the so-called “acoustic inertia of the language” (Parks 2014Parks, Tim 2014 Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books. London: Harvill Secker.Google Scholar, 220) – i.e., the idea that translation is also driven to a degree by the inertia of style and convention, meaning that the sound is as decisive as the sense in determining what gets said – and with the need of using a certain register and style in specific genres. This is why formality and style may be also associated with the term phraseology. Phraseology adds flavour to a text and is a stylistic feature of many LSP texts. They are diagnostic, vital elements and “powerful indicators of register”, as Partington puts it (1998Partington, Alan 1998 Patterns and Meanings. Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 17, 20 in Biel 2014a 2014a “Phraseology in Legal Translation. A Corpus-based Analysis of Textual Mapping in EU Law.” In The Ashgate Handbook of Legal Translation, edited by Le Cheng, King Kui Sin & Anne Wagner, 177–192. Farnham: Ahsgate.Google Scholar, 181).

However, phraseology may also exist because fixed and standardized expressions may be useful: they require little encoding and they get things done in communication (MacKenzie and Kayman 2016MacKenzie, Ian and Martin A. Kayman 2016 “Introduction: Formulaicity and Creativity in Language and Literature.” European Journal of English Studies 20(1):1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1). Phraseology is also associated with the term combinability and this goes back to the famous Firthian principle of “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth 1957Firth, John Rupert 1957 A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory. Studies in Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar, 11). Words tend to co-occur together and the frequent combination of two words may generate a collocation or a phrase. Closely related to the combinability and the above-mentioned concepts, is the idea of predictability and expectancy: language users (and readers of texts) may be able to predict the presence of certain fixed expressions and, in some cases like in legal genres, they may even expect the use of certain patterns in the text. Lastly, from a semantic point of view, phraseology tends to show another important feature, that is (non)-compositionality or syntactic (in)-flexibility, i.e., the fact that the meaning of a phraseological unit is not distributed among its components, but the expression as a whole is mapped onto its meaning, making impossible to decompose its linguistic elements.

This overview of concepts associated with the term phraseology helps to set the scene of this chapter and represents the background against which legal phraseology will be dealt with in the following sections. After defining (Section 2) and classifying (Section 3) legal phraseology from different yet complementary standpoints, the chapter exemplifies main traditional approaches (Section 4) as well as current and new ones (Section 5). It also reviews a selection of methods adopted to carry out research in this field together with some practical applications (Section 6). The final remarks (Section 7) aim at showing the advantages or disadvantages of using this kind of patterning in the discursive construction of legal texts.

2.Defining legal phraseology

Scholars have understood and accordingly defined phraseology in legal linguistics studies in different ways, following a variety of traditions and perspectives, mainly due to the inner complexity of defining a multifaceted concept. Characterized by terminological fuzziness and overlaps, LSP phraseology – and legal phraseology in particular – has usually been placed at the periphery of the discipline of phraseology (Goźdź-Roszkowski and Pontrandolfo 2015 2015 “Legal Phraseology Today: Corpus-based Applications Across Legal Languages and Genres.” Fachsprache 3–4:130–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2018 2018 “Facts in Law. A Comparative Study of fact that and its phraseologies in American and Polish Judicial Discourse.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 143–159. London: Routledge.Google Scholar; Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 100–104), as a special case or exception from the rule (Kjær 2007 2007 “Phrasemes in legal texts.” In Phraseology/Phraseologie: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research / Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, edited by Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter Kühn and Neal R. Norrick, 506–516. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar, 506). This is also due to the frequent overlaps with the terminological sphere: legal phraseological units are often described as multi-word terms and are commonly dismissed as not being phraseological at all or left undescribed (Kjær 2007 2007 “Phrasemes in legal texts.” In Phraseology/Phraseologie: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research / Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, edited by Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter Kühn and Neal R. Norrick, 506–516. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar, 507).

A preliminary distinction should therefore be made: the term can refer either to patterns which are recurrent in legal texts (phraseology in legal language) or, as put forward by Kjær (1990b) 1990b “Phraseology Research. State-of-the-Art Methods of Describing Word Combinations in Language for Specific Purposes.” In Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):3–20.Google Scholar, to patterns which have a legal effect in a text (legal phraseology) (see also Ruusila and Lindroos 2016Ruusila, Anna, and Emilia Lindroos 2016 “Conditio sine qua non: On Phraseology in Legal Language and its Translation.” Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito 3(1):120–140.Google Scholar and the distinction between content vs. non-content phrases in Section 3 applied to legal lexical bundles). The following examples will clarify the distinction: without prejudice to is a complex preposition which is frequently used in legal texts but which does not have a specific legal meaning (it can be replaced with equivalent expression such as “without harming or affecting something”); on the other hand, to dismiss the appeal is a phraseological unit (more precisely a collocation) which has a legal and performative effect in the text (i.e., the court refuses to hear and try a case already decided in a lower court); its use is phraseological in the sense that the term appeal collocates with the verb dismiss and it is the standard, legal way of expressing this concept in judicial proceedings. However, this distinction is not always applied in legal linguistics studies where the two terms are frequently used as synonyms. Moreover, the former actually includes the latter, so that it can be considered a more general term which also includes those specific types of units having a legal meaning in legal texts.

The focus of the present chapter is on both types of units, so the term legal phraseology (and legal phraseological units/phraseologisms) will be used as an umbrella label to denote typical and frequent patterns found in legal texts which may or may not have legal effects in legal documents. Moreover, as in the case of the term legal terminology, it is worth stressing that it may also refer to the discipline which studies the word combinations in legal settings. In her 1990a paper, devoted to the state of the art of LSP phraseology, Kjær underlines the ambiguity of the term phraseology at three different levels (1990aKjær, Anne Lise 1990a “Context-Conditioned Word Combinations in Legal Language.” Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):21–32.Google Scholar, 5–6):

  1. term phraseology denoting phraseology theory in the terminological sense. Its subject is primarily the combinability of terms (LSP words);

  2. lexico-phraseology denoting phraseology theory in the lexicological word combinations in language for general purposes. It stands in contrast to the inventory of free Language for General Purposes (LGP) word combinations;

  3. LSP phraseology denoting the inventory of phraseological word combinations in language for specific purposes. It stands in contrast to the inventory of free LSP word combinations.

Most of the attempts at defining a legal phraseological unit have been based on the definition of phraseology in LGP (see, among others, Biel 2014b 2014b Lost in the Eurofog. Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 30–31; Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 67–105; Pontrandolfo 2020 2020 “Fraseología y traducción en el discurso de especialidad.” Publifarum 33:1–28.Google Scholar; Wray 2002Wray, Alison 2002 Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 9), where a wide range of labels have been used to define a phraseological unit (see Table 1) (see Granger and Paquot 2008Granger, Sylviane and Magali Paquot 2008 “Disentangling The Phraseological Web.” In Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier, 27–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Nikitina 2017Nikitina, Jekaterina 2017 Legal Style Markers and their Translation in Written Pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Milan., 42–46; Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 67–87). Each of these terms focuses on a particular aspect of the word combination, such as its formulaicity or the frequency/recurrence of certain patterns.

Table 1.Denominations of phraseological unit in LGP (adapted from Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 68)
Scholars Denomination in LGP
Cowie 1991 1991 “Multiword Units in Newspaper Language.” Cahiers de l’Institut de Linguistique de Louvain 17(1–3):101–106. DOI logoGoogle Scholar multiword (lexical) unit
Burger 1998Burger, Harald 1998 Phraseologie. Eine Einführung am Beispiel des Deutschen. Berlin: Wrich Schmidt Verlag.Google Scholar; Gläser 1986Gläser, Rosemarie 1986 Phraseologie der englischen Sprache. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Sager 1992Sager, Juan C. 1992 “Future Developments and Research in Phraseology and Terminology related to Translation.” Terminologie et Traduction 2–3:584–585.Google Scholar phraseological unit
Cowie 1988Cowie, Anthony Paul 1988 “Stable and Creative Aspects of Vocabulary Use.” In Vocabulary and Language Teaching, edited by Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, 126–139. London: MacMillan.Google Scholar; Granger 1998Granger, Sylviane 1998 “Prefabricated Patterns in Advances EFL Writing: Collocations and Formulae.” In Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications, edited by Anthony Paul Cowie, 145–160. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar word combination
Burger et al. 2007Burger, Harald, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter Kühn, and Neal R. Norrick eds. 2007 Phraseologie/Phraseology. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung/An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, vol. I–II. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar; Mel’čuk 1988Mel’čuk, Igor 1988 “Semantic Description of Lexical Units in an Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary: Basic Principles and Heuristic Criteria.” International Journal of Lexicography 1(3):165–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar phraseme / set phrase
Altenberg 1998Altenberg, Bengt 1998 “On the Phraseology of Spoken English: The Evidence of Recurrent Word-Combinations.” In Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications, edited by Anthony P. Cowie, 101–122. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar recurrent word combination
Sinclair 1996Sinclair, John 1996 “The search for units of meaning.” Textus. English Studies in Italy 9:75–106.Google Scholar unit of meaning
Moon 1992Moon, Rosamund 1992 “Textual Aspects of Fixed Expressions in Learner’s Dictionaries.” In Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics, edited by P. Arnaud and H. Béjoint, 79–100. London: MacMillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar fixed expression
Moon 1998 1998 “Frequencies and Forms of Phrasal Lexemes in English.” In Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications, edited by Anthony Paul Cowie, 145–160. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar phrasal lexeme
Gläser 1998 1998 “The Stylistic Potential of Phraseological Units in the Light of Genre Analysis”. In Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications, edited by Anthony Paul Cowie, 125–143. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar phrasicon
Cowie 1994 1994 “Phraseology.” In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Ronald E. Asher, 3168–3171. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar, 1998 1998 “Introduction”. In Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications, edited by Anthony Paul Cowie, 1–20. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar prefabricated unit / prefab
Renouf and Sinclair 1991Renouf, Antoineite and John Sinclair 1991 “Collocational frameworks in English.” In English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in the Honour of Jan Svartvik, edited by Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, 128–143. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Stubbs 2007 2007 “An example of frequent English phraseology: Distribution, structures and functions.” In Corpus Linguistics 25 years on, edited by Roberta Facchinetti, 89–105. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar collocational framework phrase-frame
Granger 2005 2005 “Pushing Back the Limits of Phraseology: How Far Can We Go?”. In Proceedings of Phraseology 2005. An Interdisciplinary Conference, edited by C. Cosme, C. Gouverneur, Fanny Meunier and Magali Paquot, 165–168. Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain.Google Scholar phraseology
Biber and Conrad 1999Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad 1999 “Lexical Bundles in Conversation and Academic Prose.” In Out of Corpora: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson, edited by Hilde Hasselgård and Signe Oksefjell, 181–190. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar lexical bundle
Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992Nattinger, James R. and Jeanette DeCarrico 1992 Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar; Wray 2002Wray, Alison 2002 Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar formulaic sequence
Stubbs 2002Stubbs, Michael 2002 “Two quantitative methods of studying phraseology in English.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 7(2):215–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar chain
Stubbs 2007 2007 “An example of frequent English phraseology: Distribution, structures and functions.” In Corpus Linguistics 25 years on, edited by Roberta Facchinetti, 89–105. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar n-gram
De Cock 1998De Cock, Sylvie 1998 “A recurrent word combination approach to the study of formulae in the speech of native and non-native speakers of English.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 3(1):59–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2003 2003 Recurrent Sequences of Words in Native Speaker and Advanced Learner Spoken and Written English. PhD Dissertation. Université Catholique de Louvain. recurrent sequence
Scott and Tribble 2006Scott, Mike and Christopher Tribble 2006 Textual Patterns: Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar cluster
Gläser 1986Gläser, Rosemarie 1986 Phraseologie der englischen Sprache. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Gries 2008Gries, Stefan Th 2008 “Phraseology and Linguistic Theory: A Brief Survey.” In Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier, 3–25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar phraseologism
Hunston 2008Hunston, Susan 2008 “Starting with the small words: Patterns, lexis and semantic sequences.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13(3):271–295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar semantic sequence

The situation is rather similar in LSP, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2.Denominations of phraseological unit in LSP (adapted from Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 87–88)
Scholars Denomination in LSP
Kjær 1990aKjær, Anne Lise 1990a “Context-Conditioned Word Combinations in Legal Language.” Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):21–32.Google Scholar, 1990b 1990b “Phraseology Research. State-of-the-Art Methods of Describing Word Combinations in Language for Specific Purposes.” In Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):3–20.Google Scholar; Pavel 1993Pavel, Silvia 1993 “Neology and Phraseology as Terminology-in-the-making.” In Terminology: Applications in Interdisciplinary Communication, edited by Helmi B. Sonneveld and Kurt L. Loening, 21–34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Picht 1987Picht, Heribert 1987 “Terms and their LSP environment-LSP Phraseology.” Meta 32(2):149–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar LSP phraseology
Picht 1990 1990 “A Study of LSP Phraseological Elements in Spanish Technical Texts.” Terminology Science and Research 1(1–2):49–58.Google Scholar LSP phrase
Kjær 1990aKjær, Anne Lise 1990a “Context-Conditioned Word Combinations in Legal Language.” Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):21–32.Google Scholar, 1990b 1990b “Phraseology Research. State-of-the-Art Methods of Describing Word Combinations in Language for Specific Purposes.” In Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):3–20.Google Scholar LSP phraseme
Bergenholtz and Tarp 1994Bergenholtz, Henning and Sven Tarp 1994 “Mehrworttermini und Kollokationen in Fachwörterbüchern.” In Fachlexikographie. Fachwissen und seine Repräsentation in Wörterbüchern, edited by Burkhard Schaeder and Henning Bergenholtz, 385–419. Tuebingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar multi-word terminological phrase
Meyer and Mackintosh 1996Meyer, Ingrid and Kristen Mackintosh 1996 “Refining the Terminographer’s Concept-Analysis Methods: How Can Phraseology Help?” Terminology 3(1):1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar terminological phraseme
Cabré 1999Cabré, María Teresa 1999 La Terminología: Representación y Comunicación. Elementos para una teoría de base comunicativa y otros artículos. Barcelona: IULA, Universidad Pompeu Fabra. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Kjær 1990aKjær, Anne Lise 1990a “Context-Conditioned Word Combinations in Legal Language.” Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):21–32.Google Scholar, 1990b 1990b “Phraseology Research. State-of-the-Art Methods of Describing Word Combinations in Language for Specific Purposes.” In Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):3–20.Google Scholar; Thomas 1993Thomas, Patricia 1993 “Choosing Headwords from Language-for-Special-Purposes (LSP) Collocations for Entry into a Terminology Data Bank (Term Bank).” In Terminology: Applications in Interdisciplinary Communication, edited by Helmi B. Sonneveld and Kurt L. Loening, 43–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar terminological phrase
L’Homme 2000L’Homme, Marie-Claude 2000 “Understanding Specialized Lexical Combinations.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 6(1):89–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar SLC (specialized lexical combinations)
Musacchio and Palumbo 2008Musacchio, Maria Teresa and Giuseppe Palumbo 2008 “Shades of Grey: A Corpus-driven Analysis of LSP Phraseology for Translation Purposes.” In Corpora for University Language Teachers, edited by Carol Taylor Torsello, Katherine Ackerley & Erik Castello, 69–79. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar; Palumbo 2001Palumbo, Giuseppe 2001 “The Use of Phraseology for Training and Research in the Translation of LSP Texts.” In Training the Language Services Providers for the Millennium, edited by Maia Belinda, Johann Haller Hand Margherita Ulrych, 199–211. Porto: Facultade de Letras, Universidade do Porto.Google Scholar technical phrase

All these LSP denominations describe the technical nature of the combinations by means of adjectives like “specialized” and “technical” and allow the identification of one of the key features of phraseology in LSP, namely, the presence of terms. As will be demonstrated in this chapter, legal phraseological units tend to cluster around terms which are the building blocks of any LSP.

Most of the definitions of legal phraseology found in the literature are adapted from LGP studies. From a more traditional perspective, related to the “structure, meaning and use of word combinations” (Cowie 1994 1994 “Phraseology.” In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Ronald E. Asher, 3168–3171. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar, 3168), a phraseological unit can be defined as a construction – in the sense of multi-word lexical unit or fixed expression – of a different nature (e.g., idioms, collocations, formulae, proverbs, sequences) in which its composing elements acquire a meaning which is not predictable from the sum of meanings of its constituents (see, among others, Cowie 1994 1994 “Phraseology.” In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Ronald E. Asher, 3168–3171. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar; Granger and Paquot 2008Granger, Sylviane and Magali Paquot 2008 “Disentangling The Phraseological Web.” In Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier, 27–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). From a corpus-based perspective, it can be defined as:

the co-occurrence of a form or a lemma of a lexical item and one more or additional linguistic elements of various kinds which functions as one semantic unit in a clause or sentence and whose frequency of co-occurrence is larger than expected on the basis of chance.(Gries 2008Gries, Stefan Th 2008 “Phraseology and Linguistic Theory: A Brief Survey.” In Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier, 3–25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 6)

The advent of corpus linguistics was precisely the main factor making the traditional models “old” (see Section 4) and shifting the attention from idioms to less stable and more or less restricted word combinations that are usually found in LSP texts (Kjær 2007 2007 “Phrasemes in legal texts.” In Phraseology/Phraseologie: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research / Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, edited by Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter Kühn and Neal R. Norrick, 506–516. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar, 508).

These definitions stress the fact that phraseological units function autonomously in a clause or sentence and tend to co-occur with a certain frequency in a language or sublanguage (LSP). The key features have also been highlighted by Burger (2010 2010 Phraseologie. Eine Einführung am Beispiel des Deutschen. Berlin: Schmidt.Google Scholar, 14), who focused on two main characteristics shared by these word combinations: they consist of two or more words (polylexicality) and the combination is fixed (stability) (see Ruusila and Lindroos 2016Ruusila, Anna, and Emilia Lindroos 2016 “Conditio sine qua non: On Phraseology in Legal Language and its Translation.” Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito 3(1):120–140.Google Scholar, 122).

When it comes to legal phraseology, as emphasized by Ruusila and Lindroos, “the varying definitions and classifications of phraseological units used by researchers lead to difficulties in utilizing and comparing the research results across legal languages and legal systems” (2016Ruusila, Anna, and Emilia Lindroos 2016 “Conditio sine qua non: On Phraseology in Legal Language and its Translation.” Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito 3(1):120–140.Google Scholar, 128). To define a phraseological unit in legal language one could start by the definition of LSP phrasemes proposed by Gläser, such as “fixed, lexicalized, reproducible units that consist of two or more words” (2007 2007 “Fachphraseologie.” In Phraseology/Phraseologie: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research / Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, edited by Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter Kühn and Neal R. Norrick, vol. 2, 482–505. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar, 487, translated by the author). This fixedness may or may not have a specific legal meaning, as previously mentioned. In the former case, as indicated by Kjær (1991 1991 “Phraseologische Wortverbindungen in der Rechtssprache?” In Europhras 90. Akten der internationalen Tagung zur germanistischen Phraseologieforschung, edited by Christine Palm, 115–122. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet.Google Scholar, 115), such repetitively used formulaic expressions should be used as such and cannot be replaced by synonymous expressions. In opposition to other LSP (e.g., medicine or economics), legal phrasemes are not universal in their meaning, but bound to a particular legal system (Kjær 2007 2007 “Phrasemes in legal texts.” In Phraseology/Phraseologie: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research / Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, edited by Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter Kühn and Neal R. Norrick, 506–516. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar, 508), which leads to the necessity of studying legal phrasemes in connection with the legal system and legal culture in question (cf. Lindroos 2015Lindroos, Emilia 2015 Im Namen des Gesetzes. Eine vergleichende rechtslinguistische Untersuchung zur Formelhaftigkeit in deutschen und finnischen Strafurteilen. Rovaniemi: Lapland University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 166; Ruusila and Lindroos 20Ruusila, Anna, and Emilia Lindroos 2016 “Conditio sine qua non: On Phraseology in Legal Language and its Translation.” Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito 3(1):120–140.Google Scholar16, 130). An ad-hoc definition of legal phraseology could therefore be the following: crystallized lexical and/or morphosyntactic patterns, varying in complexity and internal cohesion, which are “handed down” from texts to texts and become recurrent in specific legal cultures and discourse communities. These patterns frequently co-occur in legal documents as a result of its use by legal professionals who, as part of a specific community of practice, employ them in their daily jargon so that these word combinations represent a discursive pattern typical of certain legal genres. These units may have a specific legal meaning or not, depending on the textual coordinates of the legal genre.

One of the key features of legal phraseological units is that they tend to cluster around legal terms, which is why it is necessary to make a distinction between a legal terminological unit (LTU) and a legal phraseological unit (LPU), even though the boundaries between the two concepts are fuzzy.11.An example could be “The A to Z guide to legal phrases” (http://​www​.plainenglish​.co​.uk​/files​/legalguide​.pdf): most of the terms labelled as “legal phrases” in the UK guide to plain English are legal terms and not phrasemes. The very fact that they can be defined and have a legal definition confirms that they refer to legal concepts and therefore are terminological units. LTUs tend to refer to concepts which can be legally defined whereas LPUs tend to be used for discursive/stylistic reasons, especially in the case of patterns belonging to the category phraseology in legal language. From a syntactic point of view, LTUs are often nominal categories whereas LPUs may include different categories (verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc.). From a semantic point of view, LTUs are lexical units having a denominative and referential character, whereas LPUs are combinations of words having a relational character. As pointed out by Bevilacqua (2004Bevilacqua, Cleci Regina 2004 Unidades fraseológicas especializadas eventivas. Descripción y reglas de formación en el ámbito de la energía solar. Barcelona: Universidad Pompeu Fabra.Google Scholar, 28 in Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 93–94), LTUs denotes a node of the conceptual structure of a specialized domain whereas LPUs are generally made of a terminological nucleus (simple or multiple LTUs) combined with verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc., which represent the activities and processes typical of a specific domain. An example – partially based on Kjær (1990aKjær, Anne Lise 1990a “Context-Conditioned Word Combinations in Legal Language.” Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):21–32.Google Scholar, 18–19) – will clarify this distinction: bill of exchange is a legal terminological unit (a multi-word term) because it has a specific definition in law22.See its definition in the Black’s Law Dictionary: https://​thelawdictionary​.org​/bill​-of​-exchange​/#:~:text​=An%20open%20(that%20is%2C%20unsealed,or%20to%20the%20drawer%20himself. whereas to accept a bill is a legal phraseological unit (more precisely, a collocation made by a verb + a noun) which has a specific meaning in the legal domain even though the meaning of the verb accept can be paraphrased by other verbs such as take on or assume. Kjær stresses the fact that the word combination forms a lexically stable unit which can be broken only within lexicalized limits (1990b 1990b “Phraseology Research. State-of-the-Art Methods of Describing Word Combinations in Language for Specific Purposes.” In Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):3–20.Google Scholar, 24) and these restrictions on combinability also depend on the user of legal language (1990b 1990b “Phraseology Research. State-of-the-Art Methods of Describing Word Combinations in Language for Specific Purposes.” In Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):3–20.Google Scholar, 26). Consequently, in some cases the wording is prescribed by law whereas in other the author (legal expert) may alter the wording by using synonyms without affecting the meaning of the legal text.

The permeability of the distinction between legal terminology versus legal phraseology is also demonstrated by the role played by phraseology as “terminology in the making” (see Pavel 1993Pavel, Silvia 1993 “Neology and Phraseology as Terminology-in-the-making.” In Terminology: Applications in Interdisciplinary Communication, edited by Helmi B. Sonneveld and Kurt L. Loening, 21–34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 21–34): some phraseological units become terminological units as in the case of the Italian verbs collocating with prova (evidence), i.e., acquisizione/assunzione (gathering of evidence) versus ammissione (admission of evidence) (see Scarpa, Peruzzo, and Pontrandolfo 2017Scarpa, Federica, Katia Peruzzo, and Gianluca Pontrandolfo 2017 “Methodological, Terminological and Phraseological Challenges in the Translation into English of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure: What’s New in the Second Edition.” In The Italian Code of Criminal Procedure. Critical Essays and English Translation, edited by Mitja Gialuz, Luca Luparia & Federica Scarpa, 57–95. Milan: Wolters Kluwer/Giuffrè.Google Scholar, 90).

Defining legal phraseology also means classifying it; as a matter of fact, most definitions found in the literature are based on the identification of the types of legal phrasemes which constitute the essence of their conceptualization.

3.Classifying legal phraseology

Attempts to provide all-inclusive classifications of legal phraseology have been made in the last 30 years (for an overview, see Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 100–104; Biel 2014b 2014b Lost in the Eurofog. Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 34–36; Goźdź-Roszkowski and Pontrandolfo 2015 2015 “Legal Phraseology Today: Corpus-based Applications Across Legal Languages and Genres.” Fachsprache 3–4:130–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Ruusila and Lindroos 2016Ruusila, Anna, and Emilia Lindroos 2016 “Conditio sine qua non: On Phraseology in Legal Language and its Translation.” Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito 3(1):120–140.Google Scholar, 128–132; Nikitina 2017Nikitina, Jekaterina 2017 Legal Style Markers and their Translation in Written Pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Milan., 46–51). Even though general typologies may be useful while describing word combinations in any legal text, many classifications in the literature are based on ad-hoc categorizations which reflect specific research carried out by single scholars. One of the first and most remarkable general classifications of legal phraseology was proposed by Kjær (1990b 1990b “Phraseology Research. State-of-the-Art Methods of Describing Word Combinations in Language for Specific Purposes.” In Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF 1(1–2):3–20.Google Scholar, 26–27), who studied context-conditioned word combinations in legal language. Her classification envisages four types of combinations which are generally used in legal texts:

  1. prefabricated word combination directly prescribed by law (failure to employ those word combinations in accordance with the legally prescribed formulation will result in the invalidation of the whole text of which they form part);

  2. word combinations only indirectly prescribed by law (variation of these word combinations will not render the whole text of which they form a part invalid, but its legal force will be affected);

  3. word combination, the use of which is recommended for reasons of unambiguity (if they are varied, this may affect the security of the law; these are word combinations based on implicit quotation);

  4. routine phrases whose use is merely habitual (if they are varied, the writer of legal texts will not spend more time, but otherwise, a variation will have no effect whatsoever).

In her 2007 study, Kjær updated her statements and proposed a more general term-based typology (2007 2007 “Phrasemes in legal texts.” In Phraseology/Phraseologie: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research / Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, edited by Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter Kühn and Neal R. Norrick, 506–516. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar, 509–510):

  1. multi-word terms, with the most productive pattern [Adjective + Noun];

    1. Latin multi-word terms, e.g., ex officio;

  2. collocations with a term;

    1. LSP phrases (Fachwendungen): [Noun + Verb];

    2. Support Verb Construction (Funktionsverbgefge): [(Preposition) + Noun +Verb].

  3. formulaic expressions and standard phrases, including

    1. binomials (“word phrase patterns consisting of two words belonging to the same word class, connected by a conjunction”);

    2. phrasemes with archaic words or word forms.

The second proposal emphasizes the importance of terms in legal phraseology. Word combinations in legal language tend to cluster around the key concepts (terms) of that domain; therefore, collocations tend to have a term as the node of the expression, as in the case of the above-mentioned example to accept a bill of exchange. Phraseology acts as a strong link between the term and the text.

As far as the ad-hoc classifications are concerned, scholars, mainly with linguistic and translation backgrounds, have relied on specific typologies of phraseological units to carry out their empirical studies. One of the first classifications is proposed by Goźdź-Roszkowski (2011 2011 Patterns of Linguistic Variations in American Legal English. A Corpus-based Study. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 109–142) based on Biber et al.’s (1999Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan 1999 The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar, 32–34) notion of lexical bundle, i.e., multi-word sequences that frequently occur statistically in a given language variety. Based on his American Law Corpus (ALC) (2011 2011 Patterns of Linguistic Variations in American Legal English. A Corpus-based Study. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 27–34), which includes academic journals, briefs, contracts, legislation, opinions, professional articles and textbooks, Goźdź-Roszkowski distinguishes among:

  1. legal reference: temporal (e.g., at the time of), location (e.g., in the district court), attributive (e.g., the amount of the), participative (e.g., on behalf of), institutional (e.g., the Due Process Clause), terminological (e.g., a breach of contract), procedure-related bundles (e.g., shall be entitled to);

  2. text-oriented: causative/resultative (e.g., by reason of the), condition (e.g., in the event of), clarification/topic elaboration (e.g., on the other hand), focus (e.g., at issue in this), framing (e.g., on the ground that), structuring (e.g., as provided in Section), transition bundles (e.g., in addition to the);

  3. stance: epistemic and attitudinal bundles (e.g., it is necessary to consider). (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011 2011 Patterns of Linguistic Variations in American Legal English. A Corpus-based Study. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 109–142)

Another classification, in line with Goźdź-Roszkowski’s one, which is based on the notion of lexical bundles is that of Breeze (2013Breeze, Ruth 2013 “Lexical Bundles Across Four Legal Genres.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18(2):229–253. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 234), who identifies three main types of phraseological units in four legal genres (academic law, case law, legislation, and legal documents):

  1. stance expressions;

  2. text-organizing expressions;

  3. referential expressions.

It is interesting to observe that Breeze, based on Pecorari (2009)Pecorari, Diane 2009 “Formulaic Language in Biology. A Topic-specific Investigation.” In Academic Writing: At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse, edited by Diane Pecorari, Maggie Charles & Susan Hunston, 91–105. London: Continuum.Google Scholar, makes a distinction between content and non-content phrases, due to the fact that, as already shown, lexical bundles may refer to specific (legal) aspects of the content of texts (e.g., request for confidential treatment) or not (e.g., in terms of, the fact that). This distinction between content-related and non-content bundles proves to be essential in that it recognizes that legal texts are also characterized by non-legal word combinations (e.g., on the basis of vs. on the ground that / as described in paragraph vs. shall be entitled to). The main advantage of these two proposals is that they are based on a wide range of legal genres.

An interesting classification of phrasemes in the language of law, which is not based on a single type (lexical bundles as in the previous ones) but specifically designed for EU legislative texts, and used effectively also for other legal genres, is provided by Biel (2014a 2014a “Phraseology in Legal Translation. A Corpus-based Analysis of Textual Mapping in EU Law.” In The Ashgate Handbook of Legal Translation, edited by Le Cheng, King Kui Sin & Anne Wagner, 177–192. Farnham: Ahsgate.Google Scholar, 178–182). The author clearly indicates that this classification should be viewed within a phraseological continuum with fuzzy boundaries between each category, ranging from the global textual level to the local microlevel:

  1. text-organizing patterns (e.g., the opening and closing sections of EU instruments);

  2. grammatical patterns (e.g., shall, must, otherwise, provided that, in order to);

  3. term-forming patterns (multi-word terms) (e.g., person acting in concert, cross-border merger of limited liability company);

  4. term-embedding collocations (e.g., to hold shares, pro-rata issue of securities);

  5. lexical collocations (e.g., subject to this Regulation, the costs […] shall be borne by).

Pontrandolfo’s (2016 2016 Fraseología y lenguaje judicial. Las sentencias penales desde una perspectiva contrastiva. Roma: Aracne.Google Scholar based on Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste.) classification is specifically designed for judicial texts and tested on the COSPE corpus. Based on Corpas Pastor’s (1996)Corpas Pastor, Gloria 1996 Manual de fraseología española. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar LGP classification of phraseology, he focuses on four main patterns:

  1. complex prepositions (e.g., without prejudice to, in pursuance of);

  2. lexical doublets and triplets (e.g., adequate and proper, noble and learned);

  3. lexical collocations (e.g., to quash an appeal, credibility of the appellant);

  4. routine formulae (e.g., for these reasons, I would allow the appeal and quash the appellant’s conviction, I agree that the appeal should be allowed).

Finally, Nikitina (2017Nikitina, Jekaterina 2017 Legal Style Markers and their Translation in Written Pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Milan., 99–100), based on a corpus of pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), proposes a classification of multi-word units in written pleadings which takes into account the other classifications proposed by the above-mentioned scholars:

  1. formulaic units

    1. binomials/multinomials (e.g., rights and freedoms, legality and reasonableness)

    2. archaic words or word forms (e.g., herein, thereof, aforesaid, henceforth)

    3. routine formulae (e.g., on the grounds of aforesaid, I request ECtHR to)

  2. term-related units;

    1. multi-word terms (e.g., Convention rights, Human rights)

    2. collocation with a term (e.g., to submit observations, the Court upholds)

  3. grammatical units

    1. modal auxiliaries (e.g., shall, must, should, may, if-then, with a view to -ing)

    2. complex prepositions (e.g., by virtue of, owing to)

The list of classifications presented in this section is obviously not exhaustive (see also Table 3) although it is representative of the main categories identified in the literature. As specified by many authors, these categories should be placed along a phraseological continuum and read with a certain degree of flexibility and fuzziness (Granger and Paquot 2008Granger, Sylviane and Magali Paquot 2008 “Disentangling The Phraseological Web.” In Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier, 27–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 29).

4.Old perspectives

The dawn of legal phraseology studies is characterized by a stable or traditional view of phraseological units. The very first studies specifically devoted to legal language dealt with the so-called binomial or multinomial expressions (also referred to as doublets/triplets) (Bhatia 1984Bhatia, Vijay K. 1984 “Syntactic Discontinuity in Legislative Writing and its Implication for Academic Legal Purposes.” In Reading for Professional Purposes. Studies and Practices in Native and Foreign Languages, edited by A. K. Pugh and J. M. Ulijn, 90–96. London: Heinemann Educational Books.Google Scholar, 1993 1993 Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Child 1992Child, Barbara 1992 Drafting Legal Documents: Principles and Practices. St. Paul Minnesoa: West Publishing.Google Scholar; Crystal and Davy 1969Crystal, David and Derek Davy 1969 “The Language of Legal Documents.” In Investigating English Style, edited by David Crystal and Derek Davy, 193–217. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar; Gustafsson 1984Gustaffson, Marita 1984 “The Syntactic Features of Binomial Expressions in Legal English.” Text 4(1–3):123–141.Google Scholar; Maley 1987Maley, Yon 1987 “The Language of Legislation” Language in Society 16:25–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 1994 1994 “The Language of the Law.” In Language and the Law, edited by John Peter Gibbons, 11–50. London: Longman.Google Scholar; Malkiel 1959Malkiel, Yakov 1959 “Studies in Irreversible Binomials.” Lingua 21:142–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Mellinkoff 1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.Google Scholar, 1982 1982 Legal Writing: Sense & Nonsense. St Paul: Minnesota: West Publishing.Google Scholar; Thorntorn 1987Thornton, Garth C. 1987 Legislative Drafting. London: Butterworths.Google Scholar). One of the first sub-classifications of binomials is that of Malkiel (1959)Malkiel, Yakov 1959 “Studies in Irreversible Binomials.” Lingua 21:142–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, who distinguishes four types of doublets:

  1. near synonyms (e.g., null and void);

  2. complementary (e.g., assault and battery);

  3. opposite (e.g., assets and liabilities);

  4. subdivision (e.g., months and years);

  5. consequence (e.g., shot and killed).

In 1963, Mellinkoff tried to systematize the use and function of these expressions in legislative texts, defined as a sequence of two or more words or phrases belonging to the same grammatical category having some semantic relationship and joined by some syntactic device such as and or or (Bhatia 1984Bhatia, Vijay K. 1984 “Syntactic Discontinuity in Legislative Writing and its Implication for Academic Legal Purposes.” In Reading for Professional Purposes. Studies and Practices in Native and Foreign Languages, edited by A. K. Pugh and J. M. Ulijn, 90–96. London: Heinemann Educational Books.Google Scholar, 90 in 1993 1993 Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.Google Scholar, 108) (e.g., signed and delivered, in whole or in part, to affirm or set aside, act or omission, advice and consent, by or on behalf of, under or in accordance with, unless and until, consists or includes, wholly and exclusively, the freehold conveyed or long lease granted). As far as their function is concerned, Mellinkoff (1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.Google Scholar, 349) distinguishes between: worthless doubling (e.g., force and effect) and useful binominals (e.g., full faith and credit). Gustafsson (1984Gustaffson, Marita 1984 “The Syntactic Features of Binomial Expressions in Legal English.” Text 4(1–3):123–141.Google Scholar, 134) adds a further categorization: synonymous (e.g., last will and testament); antonymous (e.g., be present in person or by proxy); complementary (e.g., shoot and kill).

Defined as “mannerism” and therefore style markers in legal language, their purpose was initially a laudable one: to increase clarity, accuracy and unambiguity. However, the (ab)use that has been made of these patterns has resulted in a style which is, as Mellinkoff puts it, “wordy, unclear, pompous and dull” (1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.Google Scholar, 24); this is the reason why these doublets have been stigmatized as unnecessary by plain language experts, who believe that these expressions clash with the pragmatic and economy principle in language, thus affecting the linguistic quality of the final texts33.“The use of the term and/or is pervasive in legal language. Lawyers use it in all types of legal contexts – including statutes, contracts, and pleadings. Beginning in the 1930s, however, many judges decided that the term and/or should never be used in legal drafting. Ardent attacks on the term included charges that it was vague, if not meaningless, with some authorities declaring it to be a “Janus-faced verbal monstrosity,” an “inexcusable barbarism”, a “mongrel expression,” an “abominable invention,” a “crutch of sloppy thinkers,” and “senseless jargon.” Still today, critics maintain that the construct and/or is inherently ambiguous and should be avoided whenever possible–which, many detractors would argue, is always” (Robbins 2018Robbins, Ira P. 2018 “And/Or” and the Proper Use of Legal Language.” Maryland Law Review 77(2):311–337.Google Scholar, 311). (see, among others, the indications of the CMLJ in Spain, 2011CMLJ [Comisión para la Modernización del Lenguaje Jurídico] 2011 Estudio de campo: Lenguaje escrito, edited by E. Montolío Durán. Madrid: Ministerio de Justicia. https://​lenguajeadministrativo​.com​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2015​/10​/CMLJ​-Lenguaje​-escrito​.pdf, 155). On the other hand, there are authors (see, among others, Crystal and Davy 1969Crystal, David and Derek Davy 1969 “The Language of Legal Documents.” In Investigating English Style, edited by David Crystal and Derek Davy, 193–217. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar, 202; Mattila 2006Mattila, Heikki S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Translated by Christopher Goddard. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar, 232–234; Tiersma 1999Tiersma, Peter 1999 Legal Language. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar, 59–61) who are in favour of the use of these formulaic expressions, since they are the result of the historical tradition of legal language, characterized by a ritual, almost magic, language (see also Borja Albi 2000Borja Albi, Anabel 2000 El texto jurídico inglés y su traducción al español. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar, 54). In a similar vein, Bhatia attributes a specific function to these multinomial units, namely, precision and inclusion (1993 1993 Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.Google Scholar, 108) (see also Robbins 2018Robbins, Ira P. 2018 “And/Or” and the Proper Use of Legal Language.” Maryland Law Review 77(2):311–337.Google Scholar); this all-inclusiveness has been also interpreted as a need to preserve vagueness in legislative (and in general legal) texts (see, among others, Mattila 2006Mattila, Heikki S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Translated by Christopher Goddard. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar, 234)44.As indicated by Borja Albi (2000Borja Albi, Anabel 2000 El texto jurídico inglés y su traducción al español. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar: 56), the use of these binomials/multinominals could also have etymological purposes. Garner (1987)Garner, Bryan 1987 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar mentioned that the use of these synonymic expressions had etymological reasons since a term deriving from Latin or French could be accompanied by an equivalent Anglo-Saxon term (e.g., acknowledge and confess, old English and French; act and deed, Latin/French and old English; etc.). (see also Section 7 below and Biel in this volume).

Another category of legal phraseological unit, closely related to multinominal units, which gained attention in the early studies on legal phraseology were the so-called fixed, routine or stereotyped formulae. This type of phraseological unit differs from both collocations and idioms (“composites”) for the kinds of meaning they convey and the structural levels at which they operate (Cowie 1994 1994 “Phraseology.” In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Ronald E. Asher, 3168–3171. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar, 3170). Formulae evolve meanings which largely reflect the way they are used in discourse. As a matter of fact, legal phraseology was initially studied in terms of formulaicity, traditionally regarded as one of the most typical and conspicuous features of legal style (Crystal and Davy 1969Crystal, David and Derek Davy 1969 “The Language of Legal Documents.” In Investigating English Style, edited by David Crystal and Derek Davy, 193–217. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar, 194). Formulaic expressions have been found to lie at the core of much of the formal and ritualistic language so ubiquitous in legal proceedings and documents (Tiersma 1999Tiersma, Peter 1999 Legal Language. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar, 100–104). Exactly as in the case of multinominal units, on the one hand, these expressions have been perceived as an obstacle to the understanding of professional-lay communication but, on the other hand, they have been recognized as vital signposts helping interactants to orient themselves at different stages in the course of legal proceedings.

Many studies, especially of German tradition, started to investigate recurrent lexical sequences, of different length, which appear to be prefabricated. Stolze defines these units Standardformeln/standard formulae (1992Stolze, Radegundis 1992 Hermeneutisches Übersetzen: linguistiche Kategorien des Verstehens und Formulierens beim Übersetzen. Tubinga: Narr.Google Scholar, 190), habitualisierte juristische Formeln/habitual legal formulae (1999a 1999a Die Fachübersetzung. Eine Einfürung. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar, 176), standardisierte Formeln/standardized formulae (1999b 1999b “Expertenwissen des juristischen Fachübersetzers.” In Übersetzen von Rechtstexten: Fachkommunikation im Spannungsfeld zwischen Rechtsordnung und Sprache, edited by Peter Sandrini, 45–62. Tubinga: Narr.Google Scholar, 56), a term also used by Sandrini (1996Sandrini, Peter 1996 Terminologiearbeit im Recht. Vienna: Termnet.Google Scholar, 256) and Koutsivitis (formules standardisées/standardized formulae 1991Koutsivitis, Vassilis 1991 “Problèmes terminologiques de la version grecque des textes législatifs des communautés européennes.” Meta 36(1):284–290. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). The use of these formulae is highly standardized, which is why, for specific types of legal genres, such as contracts, these expressions are usually collected in templates. An example would be the boilerplate clauses (see also Tiersma 1999Tiersma, Peter 1999 Legal Language. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar, 59) which demonstrate that legal language clusters may be very long, getting to entire parts of the documents (e.g., This contract acknowledges that […] and […] agree to the following conditions, to be considered in effect after […]. […] agrees to the following: […]. In return, […] agrees to […]. The provisions of this agreement are as follows: […]. This agreement is amenable to both parties and can only be altered with the consent and signature of both parties. […] Signature. Date).55. https://​www​.contract​-template​.org​/boilerplate​-contract​.html Another example is the ritual procedure of giving evidence in court (see also Giurizzato 2008Giurizzato, Antonella 2008 “Dificultad de reformulación de las fórmulas fraseológicas y léxicas en la traducción legal del inglés al español.” In Terminología, Traducción y Comunicación especializada. Homenaje a Amelia de Irazazábal, Actas del Congreso Internacional 11–12 de octubre 2007, edited by Carmen Navarro, 231–246. Verona: Edizioni Fiorini.Google Scholar). When called to give evidence, people in the UK (but also in many other countries) are asked if they wish to take an oath or make an affirmation that the evidence is true. These types of oaths or affirmations used in court can also be considered as standardized (and highly recognizable) formulae (e.g., the oath: I swear by […] (according to religious belief) that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth or the affirmation: I do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.).66. https://​www​.nidirect​.gov​.uk​/articles​/giving​-evidence​-court There are many other examples of routine formulae adopted in various fields of law, such as those used in EU legal documents, which make the texts highly predictable and repeatable (see, among others, Nystedt 2000Nystedt, Jane 2000 “L’italiano nei documenti della CEE: le sequenze di parole.” In Linguistica giuridica italiana e tedesca. Atti del Convegno di studi ‘Linguistica giuridica italiana e tedesca: obiettivi, approcci, risultati’, edited by Daniela Veronesi, 273–284. Padova: Unipress.Google Scholar).

Another strand of research which can be included in the old perspectives under analysis is the area of lexical collocations in legal texts.77.The use of the term “lexical collocation” here slightly varies from Biel’s (2014a) 2014a “Phraseology in Legal Translation. A Corpus-based Analysis of Textual Mapping in EU Law.” In The Ashgate Handbook of Legal Translation, edited by Le Cheng, King Kui Sin & Anne Wagner, 177–192. Farnham: Ahsgate.Google Scholar, who refers to these types of units as “term-embedding collocations” (collocates of terms which embed terms in cognitive scripts and the text, evidencing combinatory properties of terms). Instead, the author defines “lexical collocations” as “routine formulae at the microstructural level which are not built around terms” (2014a 2014a “Phraseology in Legal Translation. A Corpus-based Analysis of Textual Mapping in EU Law.” In The Ashgate Handbook of Legal Translation, edited by Le Cheng, King Kui Sin & Anne Wagner, 177–192. Farnham: Ahsgate.Google Scholar, 180–181). Defined as “associations of two or more lexemes (or roots) recognized in and defined by their occurrence in a specific range of grammatical constructions” (Cowie 1994 1994 “Phraseology.” In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Ronald E. Asher, 3168–3171. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar, 3169), they reflect the strong tendency in language use to reuse certain patterns, which make them particularly useful in legal language. Following the types of lexical collocations categorized in the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English (Benson, Benson, and Ilson 1986Benson, Morton, Evelyn Benson, and Robert F. Ilson 1986 The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), many scholars decided to investigate the recurrent use of lexical collocations in the language of law. Among these authors a mention could be made to the following studies (based on Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 151–164): Berdychowska (1999)Berdychowska, Zofia 1999 “Fachsprachliche Kollokationen und terminologisierte Ausdrücke in der Sprache der Rechtswissenschaft.” In Vielfalt der Sprachen. Festschrift für Aleksander Szulc zum, edited by Maria Klanka and Peter Wiesinger, 259–273. Viena: Ed. Praesens.Google Scholar, who studied lexical collocations in the German Civil Code; Lombardi (2004)Lombardi, Alessandra 2004 Collocazioni e linguaggio giuridico. Proposte per un’analisi semi-automatica delle unità complesse in testi del diritto penale italiano e tedesco. Milan: EDUCatt Università Cattolica.Google Scholar, who carried out a corpus-based study on lexical collocations in normative and interpretative legal texts in German and Italian; Cruz Martínez (2002)Cruz Martínez, María Soledad 2002 “La colocación léxica y gramatical en el proceso penal inglés.” Ibérica 4:129–143.Google Scholar, who studied the lexical and grammatical collocations used in criminal proceedings (e.g., to appear before a court, to hear a case, to charge somebody with an offence, to indict somebody for, to be tried for, etc.); Bhatia et al. (2004)Bhatia, Vijay K., Nicola M. Langton, and Jane Lung 2004 “Legal Discourse: Opportunities and Threats for Corpus Linguistics.” In Discourse in the Professions. Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics, edited by Ulla Connor and Thomas A. Upton, 203–231. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, who analysed the lexical collocation noun + verb in a corpus of case law starting from key verbs, such as to submit, to grant, to reject, to dismiss; Giráldez Ceballos-Escalera (2009)Giráldez Ceballos-Escalera, Joaquín 2009 Las colocaciones léxicas en el lenguaje jurídico del derecho civil francés. Unpublished PhD Thesis. UNED: Madrid., who studied lexical collocations in French and Spanish civil texts; Fernández Bello (2008)Fernández Bello, Pedro 2008 “Las colocaciones en el lenguaje jurídico.” In Colocaciones y fraseología en los diccionarios, edited by Carmen Mellado, 69–84. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar, who extracted a wide range of collocations typical of the judicial style from a corpus of criminal and civil judgments delivered by the Spanish Supreme Court.

These three areas of phraseological interest, which characterized the early studies in the field of legal phraseology, confirmed (also empirically) the highly formulaic nature of legal language. However, the scope of these studies was heavily limited: phraseology was mainly studied monolingually as a lexical environment of terms (it had an ancillary function compared to terms) identified mostly manually within a very narrow range of legal genres (legislative texts being the preferred genre). These first studies also demonstrated the potential for relying on repetition, fixedness and frequency to uncover patterns of lexical combinations which may be otherwise difficult to intuit. The advent of Corpus Linguistics has radically changed the landscape of contemporary legal phraseology, resulting in an array of different approaches and perspectives and giving fresh impetus for the study of this area of language.

5.New perspectives

The rise of legal phraseology studies is commonly associated with the advent of corpus linguistics. As indicated by Buerki (2018Buerki, Andreas 2018 “Formulaic Sequences: a Drop in the Ocean of Constructions or Something More Significant?” In Formulaicity and Creativity in Language and Literature, edited by Ian MacKenzie and Martin A. Kayman, 15–36. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 17), with the availability of large corpora and the large-scale corpus-linguistic exploration of phraseological phenomena, it has become clear that idiomatic formulaic sequences are vastly outnumbered by conventional, non-idiomatic sequences that should nevertheless be considered as such, and this also applies to legal phraseology. The frequency-based approach to phraseology (Nesselhauf 2004Nesselhauf, Nadja 2004 “What are Collocations?” In Phraseological Units: Basic Concepts and their Applications, edited by D. J. Allerton, Nadja Nesselhauf and Paul Skandera, 1–21. Basel: Schwabe.Google Scholar in Granger and Paquot 2008Granger, Sylviane and Magali Paquot 2008 “Disentangling The Phraseological Web.” In Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier, 27–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 29), made possible by corpus-driven insights in the identification of lexical co-occurrence, allows one to enlarge the boundaries of the traditional phraseological unit (generally identified on the basis of linguistic criteria by means of a top-down approach), thus including a wide range of word combinations that do not all fit predetermined linguistic categories (Granger and Paquot 2008Granger, Sylviane and Magali Paquot 2008 “Disentangling The Phraseological Web.” In Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier, 27–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 29).

Corpora of legal texts have been increasingly compiled over the last decade (for an overview, see Biel 2018a 2018a “Corpora in Institutional Legal Translation: Small Steps and the Big Picture.” In Institutional Translation for International Governance. Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 25–36. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar; Marín Pérez and Rea Rizzo 2012Marín Pérez, María José and Camino Rea Rizzo 2012 “Structure and Design of the British Law Report Corpus (BLRC): A Legal Corpus of Judicial Decisions from the UK.” Journal of English Studies 10:131–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Pontrandolfo 2012Pontrandolfo, Gianluca 2012 “Legal Corpora: an Overview.” RITT (Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione) 14:121–136.Google Scholar; Pontrandolfo 2019 2019 “Corpus Methods in Legal Translation Studies.” In Research Methods in Legal Translation and Interpreting: Crossing Methodological Boundaries, edited by Łucja Biel, Jan Engberg, M. Rosario Martín Ruano and Vilelmini Sosoni, 13–28. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Vogel, Hamann, and Gauer 2017Vogel, Friedemann, Hanjo Hamann, and Isabelle Gauer 2017 “Computer-Assisted Legal Linguistics: Corpus Analysis as a New Tool for Legal Studies.” Law & Social Inquiry 43(4):1340–1363. DOI logoGoogle Scholar),88.As pointed out by Vigier and Sánchez (2017Vigier, Franisco Javier and María del Mar Sánchez 2017 “Using Parallel Corpora to Study the Translation of Legal System-Bound Terms: The Case of Names of English and Spanish Courts.” In Europhras 2017, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, edited by Ruslan Mitkov, 260–273. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 261), despite the widespread use in other fields within Translation Studies, the development of corpora has been rather slower in the field of Legal Translation, most probably due to the confidential and private nature of many legal documents. This is what Biel calls ‘legicentrism’, that is to say the tendency of existing corpora to be composed of legislation mainly (2018a 2018a “Corpora in Institutional Legal Translation: Small Steps and the Big Picture.” In Institutional Translation for International Governance. Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 25–36. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar, 29), which results in an underrepresentation of other genres. even though not all of them have been specifically built to study legal phraseology. Table 3 offers a non-exhaustive overview of a number of corpus-based studies specifically devoted to the exploration and extraction of legal phraseological units.

Table 3.Overview of corpus studies on legal phraseology
Genres Studies Types of legal phraseological unit
Normative texts (legislative)
EU legislative texts Biel (2014a) 2014a “Phraseology in Legal Translation. A Corpus-based Analysis of Textual Mapping in EU Law.” In The Ashgate Handbook of Legal Translation, edited by Le Cheng, King Kui Sin & Anne Wagner, 177–192. Farnham: Ahsgate.Google Scholar see Section 3

EUROFOG corpus

EU legislative texts (regulations and directives) (EU) and/or national legislative texts

 Biel (2014b) 2014b Lost in the Eurofog. Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar

clusters (N-grams)

collocations of editing units

lexical collocations

term-forming collocations

term-embedding collocations
EU law and Polish law Biel (2015) 2015 “Phraseological Profiles of Legislative Genres: Complex Prepositions as a Special Case of Legal Phrasemes in EU Law and National law.” Fachsprache 37(3–4):139–160. DOI logoGoogle Scholar complex prepositions
English and Polish Eurolect corpus (legislative texts) Biel (2018b) 2018b “Lexical Bundles in EU Law. The Impact of Translation Process on the Patterning of Legal Language.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 11–26. London: Routledge.Google Scholar lexical bundles (N-grams)
German and English EU law Salkie (2018)Salkie, Raphael 2018 “Legal Phraseology in Contrast: The fact that and its German Counterparts.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 126–142. London: Routledge.Google Scholar semantic sequence (the fact that)
Scottish legislation Kopaczyk (2018)Kopaczyk, Joanna 2018 “Terms and Conditions: a Comparative Study of Noun Binomials in UK and Scottish Legislation.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 160–185. London: Routledge.Google Scholar binominal expressions
Judicial texts
US Supreme Court opinions Mazzi (2010)Mazzi, Davide 2010 “This Argument Fails for Two Reasons… A Linguistic Analysis of Judicial Evaluation Strategies in US Supreme Court Judgments.” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 23(4):373–385. DOI logoGoogle Scholar semantic sequences
US Supreme Court opinions vs. Italian Supreme Court judgments Goźdź-Roszkowski and Pontrandolfo (2013) 2013 “Evaluative Patterns in Judicial Discourse: A Corpus-based Phraseological Perspective on American and Italian Criminal Judgments.” International Journal of Law, Language and Discourse 3(2):9–69.Google Scholar semantic sequences (Noun + that-clause (N che))

COSPE corpus:

Spanish, English, Italian criminal judgments

 Pontrandolfo (2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 2016 2016 Fraseología y lenguaje judicial. Las sentencias penales desde una perspectiva contrastiva. Roma: Aracne.Google Scholar) see Section 3
pleadings before the ECtHR Nikitina (2017)Nikitina, Jekaterina 2017 Legal Style Markers and their Translation in Written Pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Milan. see Section 3
CJEU judgments Trklja (2018)Trklja, Aleksandar 2018 “A Corpus Investigation of Formulaicity and Hybridity in Legal Language: a case of EU Case Law Texts.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 89–108. London: Routledge.Google Scholar formulaic expressions

US Supreme Court opinions

Polish Constitutional Court opinions

 Goźdź-Roszkowski (2018) 2018 “Facts in Law. A Comparative Study of fact that and its phraseologies in American and Polish Judicial Discourse.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 143–159. London: Routledge.Google Scholar semantic sequence (the fact that)
courtroom discourse (transcripts of trials) Szczyrbak (2018)Szczyrbak, Magdalena 2018 “Verba dicendi in Courtroom Interaction: Patterns with the Progressive.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 240–257. London: Routledge.Google Scholar verba dicendi patterns
Supreme Court of Ireland judicial opinions Mazzi (2018) 2018 “ ‘By partially renouncing their sovereignty…’ on the Discourse Function(s) of Lexical Bundles in EU-related Irish Judicial Discourse.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 189–202. London: Routledge.Google Scholar lexical bundles
CJEU and Polish Supreme Court judgments Koźbiał (2020)Koźbiał, Dariusz 2020 The Language of EU and Polish Judges: Investigating Textual Fit through Corpus Methods. Berlin: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar

complex prepositions

lexical bundles

binomials and multinomials

Latinisms
Private texts (contracts and legal agreements)
US contracts Goźdź-Roszkowski (2006)Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław 2006 “Frequent Phraseology in Contractual Instruments. A Corpus-based Study.” In New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis, edited by Maurizio Gotti and Davide Simone Giannoni, 147–161. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar lexical bundles
Portuguese and English agreements and contracts Carvalho Fonseca (2007)Carvalho Fonseca, Luciana 2007 A tradução de binomios nos contratos de common law à luz de lingüística de corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Universidade de São Paulo. Facultade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas. binomials
UK and Polish company law Biel (2012)Biel, Łucja 2012 “Areas of Similarity and Difference in Legal Phraseology: Collocations of Key Terms in UK and Polish Company Law.” In Phraseology and Discourse: Cross-Linguistic and Corpus-based Approaches, edited by Antonio Pamies, José Manuel Pazos Bretaña and Lucía Luque Nadal, 225–233. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag.Google Scholar collocations of key terms
Spanish and German purchase agreements Tabares Plasencia and Batista Rodríguez (2014)Tabares Plasencia, Encarnación and José Juan Batista Rodríguez 2014 “Unidades fraseológicas especializadas en los contratos de compraventa de inmuebles españoles y alemanes.” In Fraseología jurídica contrastiva español–alemán / Kontrastive Fachphraseologie der spanischen und deutschen Rechtssprache, edited by Encarnación Tabares Plasencia, 97–142. Berlin: Frank & Timme.Google Scholar

  • grammatical chains with prepositional value and adverbial function

  • verb + noun constructions

  • routine formulae
international negotiations acts/documents Monzó Nebot (2015)Monzó Nebot, Esther 2015 “(Re)producing Habits in International Negotiations: a Study on the Translation of Collocations.” Fachsprache 37(3–4):193–209. DOI logoGoogle Scholar collocations
English/Croatian contracts and legal agreements Dobrić Basaneže (2015)Dobrić Basaneže, Katja 2015 “Investigating ‘concgrams’ in the Language of Contracts and Legal Agreements.” Fachsprache 37(3–4):176–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar extended units of meaning (concgrams)
Contractual undertakings Dobrić Basaneže (2018) 2018 “Extended Binomial Expressions in the Language of Contracts.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 203–220. London: Routledge.Google Scholar binominals
international negotiations acts/documents Monzó Nebot (2018) 2018 “The out-grouping Society: Phrasemes Othering Underpriviledged Groups in the International Bill of Human Rights (English-French-Spanish).” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 109–125. London: Routledge.Google Scholar

phrasemes

binominals/multinomials
Mixed/other

  • textbook

  • report

  • contract

  • judgment

 Goźdź-Roszkowski (2007) 2007 “Legal Terms in Context: Phraseological Variation Across Genres.” In Evidence-based LSP. Translation, Text and Terminology, edited by Khurshid Ahmad and Margaret Rogers, 455–470. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar lexical collocations around the term ‘consideration’

ALC corpus

  • academic journals

  • briefs

  • contracts

  • legislation

  • opinions

  • professional articles

  • textbooks

 Goźdź-Roszkowski (2011) 2011 Patterns of Linguistic Variations in American Legal English. A Corpus-based Study. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar see Section 3

  • academic law

  • case law

  • legislation

  • legal documents

 Breeze (2013)Breeze, Ruth 2013 “Lexical Bundles Across Four Legal Genres.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18(2):229–253. DOI logoGoogle Scholar lexical bundles (see Section 3)
LAC (Legal academic corpus) vs. BAC (Business academic corpus) Breeze (2018) 2018 “Giving Voice to the Law: Speech Act Verbs in Legal Academic Writing.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 221–239. London: Routledge.Google Scholar lexical bundles

As shown in Table 3, most of the studies that fall within the new perspective are based on distributional categories (Granger and Paquot 2018, 38–41). The legal phraseological units under investigation in these studies are categorized on the basis of the different extraction procedures and software adopted and not, as was the case in the old perspective, on pre-determined (often fine-grained) linguistic categories. The result is a wide range of word combinations, e.g., lexical bundles, n-grams, clusters, chains, recurrent word combinations, that rely on quantitative and statistical thresholds more than on strict categories, which responds to the inevitable fuzziness of some combinations.

Large corpora of legal texts become the testbed for quantitative evidence, which is proving to be of immense value to the field of legal phraseology. The move from the traditional to the distributional/corpus-based approach to legal phraseology has enlarged and deepened the analysis of legal genres. Semantic sequences (Mazzi 2010Mazzi, Davide 2010 “This Argument Fails for Two Reasons… A Linguistic Analysis of Judicial Evaluation Strategies in US Supreme Court Judgments.” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 23(4):373–385. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Goźdź-Roszkowski and Pontrandolfo 2013 2013 “Evaluative Patterns in Judicial Discourse: A Corpus-based Phraseological Perspective on American and Italian Criminal Judgments.” International Journal of Law, Language and Discourse 3(2):9–69.Google Scholar; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2018 2018 “Facts in Law. A Comparative Study of fact that and its phraseologies in American and Polish Judicial Discourse.” In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo, 143–159. London: Routledge.Google Scholar), for example, have enabled researchers to investigate the role of phraseology in legal discourse in terms of explicit or implicit positioning strategies of legal interactants in the text. These recurring patterns become powerful means to isolate argumentative and evaluative devices, thus demonstrating that phraseological research involves examining the organization of language also beyond the level of a sentence or a clause towards larger linguistic units. By way of example, by means of a corpus-based analysis of US Supreme Court judgments, Mazzi (2010)Mazzi, Davide 2010 “This Argument Fails for Two Reasons… A Linguistic Analysis of Judicial Evaluation Strategies in US Supreme Court Judgments.” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 23(4):373–385. DOI logoGoogle Scholar identifies a number of reiterated discourse strategies indicating the judge’s stance in text: verbs, adjectives, and most interestingly the whole pattern “this/these/that/those + labelling noun”, a pattern which would have not been considered as phraseological in the old approach to legal phraseology. These studies have confirmed the key (also semantic) role played by phraseology in legal discourse, well beyond the mere question of style or standardization. This is probably one of the most vibrant strands of legal phraseology research with a host of possible applications, some of which include the automatic extraction of n-grams, which become a powerful vehicle to explore the evolution of legal language.

6.Research perspectives and applications

Legal phraseology can be studied from different perspectives and adopting different methods. The studies mentioned in Sections 4 and 5 adopt a wide range of methods and tools, often combining them to enhance the empirical results.

One of the basic methods is that of comparing LGP versus LSP (legal language) in order to isolate those patterns which are overused in legal discourse and can therefore be considered as typical of legal texts. Corpora can help researchers carry out this type of investigation semi-automatically. Another interesting comparison can consist in the analysis of variation of legal phraseology across legal genres or within a specific genre. Some of the studies mentioned in Table 3 also adopt a contrastive perspective (e.g., Spanish vs. German or English vs. Italian) and some of them are based on comparable corpora (original texts) whereas others rely on parallel ones (original vs. translated texts). Legal phraseology is, as a matter of fact, one of the challenges of legal translation, which is why many studies adopt a contrastive and translation perspective.

Research into legal phraseology can be fostered by different research interests. The applications and usefulness of this area of research can be summarized in (at least) six main groups:

  1. Contrastive linguistics

  2. Legal translation and training of legal translators

  3. Lexicography and Terminography

  4. Electronic management / (semi)-automatic search of legal phrasemes

  5. Corpus-assisted drafting of legal documents

  6. Plain legal language (simplification of legalese)

As far as contrastive linguistics is concerned, research into the regularities of legal discourse in different languages may allow for an investigation of the legal culture behind languages. Pontrandolfo’s (2013 2013 La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español, italiano, inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Trieste., 2016 2016 Fraseología y lenguaje judicial. Las sentencias penales desde una perspectiva contrastiva. Roma: Aracne.Google Scholar) investigation of legal phraseological units in three different legal cultures (England and Wales, Spain and Italy) shows the generic and discursive construction of criminal judgments in the three legal settings, connecting linguistic and stylistic observations to the conceptual underpinnings of the judicial reasoning. The study has specific applications for translation purposes. Another example of translation-oriented contrastive study which straddles the two areas of applications is López-Arroyo and Moreno Pérez’s (2019)López Arroyo, Belén and Leticia Moreno Pérez 2019 “Lexical Chunks in English and Spanish Sales Contracts. A Corpus-based Study.” Terminology 25(1):32–59.Google Scholar corpus-based study of contractual documents. Using a comparable corpus of English and Spanish sales contracts, the authors focus on recurrent phraseological patterns, classifying them according to form and meaning. The results of the study are useful for legal translators and drafters, especially because phraseology is a quality-enhancing factor in legal translation. Familiarizing oneself with the routines of the genre, as well as mastering their use (both at receptive and productive level) are crucial factors in legal translators’ training (Garzone 2007Garzone, Giuliana 2007 “Osservazioni sulla didattica della traduzione giuridica.” In Tradurre le microlingue scientifico-professionali. Riflessioni teoriche e proposte didattiche, edited by Paola Mazzotta and Laura Salmon, 194–238. Torino: UTET.Google Scholar). As a matter of fact, phraseology is one of the discursive elements which mostly contribute to the naturalness of the translated text.

Another application of legal phraseology research is the area of lexicography and terminography. As demonstrated in different studies (see, among others, Buendía Castro and Faber 2015)Buendía Castro, Miriam and Pamela Faber 2015 “Phraseological Units in English-Spanish Legal Dictionaries: A Comparative Study.” Fachsprache 37(3–4):161–175. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, phraseology is generally absent in legal dictionaries, which focus almost exclusively on specialized terms, most of which are multi-word terms (term phrasemes). Corpus-based studies can help improve the quality of these resources by providing them with important units which play a pivotal role in legal genres.

The extraction of legal phraseological units and especially fixed, highly repetitive patterns may also be used to populate online specialized databases. This is the case of TermWise (Heylen et al. 2014Heylen, Kris, Stephen Bond, Dirk Hertog, Ivan Vulic, and Hendrik J. Kockaert 2014 TermWise: A CAT-tool with Context-Sensitive Terminological Support. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14), 4018–4022. Reykjavik: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar), which aims to leverage online translation data for terminological support to legal translators at the Belgian Federal Ministry of Justice. By means of a complementary database, Term&Phrase Memory, it integrates with existing Computer-Assisted Translation tools. The repetitiveness and patterning of certain legal genres may allow for the design of platforms that help legal professionals to draft their texts. Corpus-assisted drafting of legal documents is one of the practical applications of legal phraseology extraction. A recent example is Da Cunha’s ArText99. http://​iriadacunha​.com​/FundacionBBVA2015​/es​/acceso​-al​-sistema/ application which exploits routine formulae and standardized sentences in the machine-assisted drafting of administrative documents.

Finally, legal phrasemes may also be the target of simplification; redundant expressions are often criticized for hindering the comprehension of legal texts. Corpus-based studies of legal phraseology can help scholars identify worthless versus useful patterns (see Mellinkoff 1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.Google Scholar, 349).

7.Final remarks

The words of law naturally tend to pattern and such patterning is crucial in the construction of legal texts. Phraseology weaves the intricate webs of law; as indicated by Biel (2014b 2014b Lost in the Eurofog. Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 36–37), legal patterns may help the reader navigate through the text, thus easing the progress of discourse. Moreover, prescribed formulaicity institutionalizes the discourse by limiting drafters’ creativity and idiosyncrasy with the final result of having a text which is organized both at macro and microlevel. However, this patterning has also some disadvantages. Table 4 summarized contrastive views on phraseology in legal texts.

Table 4.Advantages and disadvantages of patterning in legal discourse
Advantages Disadvantages
Increased compliance with the “horizons of expectation” / recognizability of the genre (by expert readers) Increased difficulty with the interpretation of legal texts (by lay readers): legal texts characterized by a “wordy, unclear, pompous and dull” style (see Mellinkoff 1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.Google Scholar)
Compliance with the legal style / flavour (see Gustafsson 1984Gustaffson, Marita 1984 “The Syntactic Features of Binomial Expressions in Legal English.” Text 4(1–3):123–141.Google Scholar: “a distinct style marker” of legalese”) / ritual-magic nature of legal language (Borja Albi 2000Borja Albi, Anabel 2000 El texto jurídico inglés y su traducción al español. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar, 54) Since words in legal texts are construed so as to bear a meaning, unnecessary words may become a potential source of contention (Thornton 1987Thornton, Garth C. 1987 Legislative Drafting. London: Butterworths.Google Scholar) especially if the used phrasemes do not serve a useful purpose (Mellinkoff 1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.Google Scholar)
For insiders: increased sense of belonging to a legal community (formulaicity as a virtue, see Biel 2014b 2014b Lost in the Eurofog. Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 177) For outsiders: increased petrification and lack of spontaneity (formulaicity as a vice, see Biel 2014b 2014b Lost in the Eurofog. Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 177)
Increased “precision and all-inclusiveness” (Bhatia 1993 1993 Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.Google Scholar) (vagueness as a resource for all-inclusiveness) Increased vagueness and ambiguity (vagueness as a source of noise)
The increased repetition of patterns favours the repeatability/re-production of legal texts (simplified drafting for legal experts and translators using CAT-tools) Repetition and standardization may adversely affect the style of the legal text
Prefabricated units allow drafters (and translators) “to balance new information with old information, novelty with habit (prefabs contributing to the second items of these pairs) to cut down processing effort (Partington 1998Partington, Alan 1998 Patterns and Meanings. Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 20) Prefabricated units may increase the processing effort as a consequence of a higher lexical (and phraseological) density

The arguments for and against legal phraseology in legal texts confirms one of the first assumptions made in this chapter: the need to adopt a flexible view on a slippery discursive phenomenon. When analysing the old and new perspectives or the methods and applications of legal phraseology research, it is fundamental to avoid clear-cut classifications in favour of eclectic perspectives which recognize the fuzzy nature of these units. A wide range of methodological perspectives on legal phraseology enable scholars to obtain different and complementary results. The traditional and the new approaches can be reconciled, as several current studies empirically demonstrate and will continue to demonstrate in the future.

Notes

1.An example could be “The A to Z guide to legal phrases” (http://​www​.plainenglish​.co​.uk​/files​/legalguide​.pdf): most of the terms labelled as “legal phrases” in the UK guide to plain English are legal terms and not phrasemes. The very fact that they can be defined and have a legal definition confirms that they refer to legal concepts and therefore are terminological units.
3.“The use of the term and/or is pervasive in legal language. Lawyers use it in all types of legal contexts – including statutes, contracts, and pleadings. Beginning in the 1930s, however, many judges decided that the term and/or should never be used in legal drafting. Ardent attacks on the term included charges that it was vague, if not meaningless, with some authorities declaring it to be a “Janus-faced verbal monstrosity,” an “inexcusable barbarism”, a “mongrel expression,” an “abominable invention,” a “crutch of sloppy thinkers,” and “senseless jargon.” Still today, critics maintain that the construct and/or is inherently ambiguous and should be avoided whenever possible–which, many detractors would argue, is always” (Robbins 2018Robbins, Ira P. 2018 “And/Or” and the Proper Use of Legal Language.” Maryland Law Review 77(2):311–337.Google Scholar, 311).
4.As indicated by Borja Albi (2000Borja Albi, Anabel 2000 El texto jurídico inglés y su traducción al español. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar: 56), the use of these binomials/multinominals could also have etymological purposes. Garner (1987)Garner, Bryan 1987 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar mentioned that the use of these synonymic expressions had etymological reasons since a term deriving from Latin or French could be accompanied by an equivalent Anglo-Saxon term (e.g., acknowledge and confess, old English and French; act and deed, Latin/French and old English; etc.).
7.The use of the term “lexical collocation” here slightly varies from Biel’s (2014a) 2014a “Phraseology in Legal Translation. A Corpus-based Analysis of Textual Mapping in EU Law.” In The Ashgate Handbook of Legal Translation, edited by Le Cheng, King Kui Sin & Anne Wagner, 177–192. Farnham: Ahsgate.Google Scholar, who refers to these types of units as “term-embedding collocations” (collocates of terms which embed terms in cognitive scripts and the text, evidencing combinatory properties of terms). Instead, the author defines “lexical collocations” as “routine formulae at the microstructural level which are not built around terms” (2014a 2014a “Phraseology in Legal Translation. A Corpus-based Analysis of Textual Mapping in EU Law.” In The Ashgate Handbook of Legal Translation, edited by Le Cheng, King Kui Sin & Anne Wagner, 177–192. Farnham: Ahsgate.Google Scholar, 180–181).
8.As pointed out by Vigier and Sánchez (2017Vigier, Franisco Javier and María del Mar Sánchez 2017 “Using Parallel Corpora to Study the Translation of Legal System-Bound Terms: The Case of Names of English and Spanish Courts.” In Europhras 2017, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, edited by Ruslan Mitkov, 260–273. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 261), despite the widespread use in other fields within Translation Studies, the development of corpora has been rather slower in the field of Legal Translation, most probably due to the confidential and private nature of many legal documents. This is what Biel calls ‘legicentrism’, that is to say the tendency of existing corpora to be composed of legislation mainly (2018a 2018a “Corpora in Institutional Legal Translation: Small Steps and the Big Picture.” In Institutional Translation for International Governance. Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 25–36. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar, 29), which results in an underrepresentation of other genres.

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