Language and Law in Professional Discourse PDF Download

Author: Vijay K. Bhatia
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443857661
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This book provides insights into the ways in which legal professionals participate in their day-to-day activities, and critically focuses on how language is used and exploited in everyday professional discourse. It is organised into two parts dealing with topic areas of legal discourse (written and spoken) relevant to professional practice and communication. The innovative research landscape offered by this book covers diverse and complex features of legal discourse construction where socially informed aspects of language use are negotiated by professional practices. Such features provide the wide scope for the critical study of legal language as a tool for social action, and set up a descriptive and interpretive framework for engaging with representations of legal discourses and genres where authority, power, ideology, as well as areas of hybridity, intertextuality, interdiscursivity and recontextualization are involved in legal discourse. This book brings together scholars from a wide academic spectrum around the globe with an interest in the intricacies of language and law as they play out in the real world. The book, therefore, offers both a resource and a stimulus to the wider readership.

Author: Kenneth Kong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107025265
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
"Using a wide range of examples such as research papers, business reports, performance commentaries, professional guidebooks and legal documents, this book examines the discourse of professional writing. Employing a number of analytic paradigms includingsystemic functional linguistics, pragmatics, text analysis and sociological and anthropological linguistics, the author explores a wide range of professional genres. He argues that while professions use different sets of practices, their use of language displays many universals, and demonstrates this through examples and data from a broad cross section of professional settings such as medicine, law, business, mass media, and engineering. This examination of professional discourse, and its important role in society, will be of interest to researchers in linguistics, applied linguists, and those working on the teaching of English for specific purposes"--

Author: Stanislaw Gozdz Roszkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100048386X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This book explores the language of judges. It is concerned with understanding how language works in judicial contexts. Using a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it looks in detail at the ways in which judicial discourse is argued, constructed, interpreted and perceived. Focusing on four central themes - constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities, judicial argumentation and evaluative language, judicial interpretation, and clarity in judicial discourse - the book’s ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current critical issues of the role of language in judicial settings. Contributors include legal linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, legal translators and anthropologists, who explore patterns of linguistic organisation and use in judicial institutions and analyse language as an instrument for understanding both the judicial decision-making process and its outcome. The book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in legal linguistics and those specialising in judicial argumentation and reasoning ,and forensic linguists interested in the use of language in judicial settings.

Author: Peter Goodrich
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349112836
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Lawyers and the law have long been the object of popular criticism and satire for the obscurity and incomprehensibility of their language. Legal Discourse provides a novel historical and systematic account of the language of the legal institution together with a sustained criticism of legal exegesis and `legalese' more generally. In the first part of the work the doctrinal history of the legal discipline and its concepts of language, text and sign are examined and assessed. In the second part the contemporary disciples of linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies are brought to bear upon the task of constructing a theory of legal discourse as a linguistics of legal power.

Author: Gaby Schneidereit
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638654494
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 53

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1-, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine" (Anglistisches Institut), course: Domain Specific English Language - Language and Law, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The English language has taken over the key role in international trade, legislation and policy-making. It has achieved "the enhanced status ...] as the dominant world language which] has led to an increased demand for the training of competent specialists able to mediate" (Alcaraz Varo/Hughes, 2002: 1). This goes along with a "phenomenal increase in the teaching of ...] 'English for special (or specific) purposes' " (ibid.: 2). What is the reason for this development? This piece of work might give an answer; it dedicates itself to domain specific English language: language and law. It concentrates on the characteristics of the structure of legal English in particular. An overview of the central structural features is given, without claiming completeness. Legal professionals aim at a precise explanation of facts which should leave no doubts. This aim forces them to use a certain kind of language pattern, such as including a high amount of definitions in legal texts, along with numerous complex and ancient phrases deriving from Law French and plentiful enumerations which can all together form a single sentence covering several lines. Dependent on which party they represent, lawyers make frequent use of features that reduce the agent in his identity while emphasizing the action - a matter of strategy which has the impeding of comprehension as a consequence. Therefore, the field of law becomes completely unapproachable for laymen, who are scarcely able to follow legal discourse. Even well-educated native speakers often find it hard to understand the language used in court. However, the access to one's rights is important. To begin with, the reader will be provided with an

Author: Teresa Fanego
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262837
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.

Author: Girolamo Tessuto
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527594726
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
This volume provides a stage for an extensive exploration of the interface between medicine, law and other disciplines or professions. It offers the reader opportunities to understand how this integrative, interactive interdisciplinary process can be examined through the lenses of language, discourse and communication. Contributions cover cross-wise issues raised by paradigmatic cases of bioethics and law, nursing ethics and law, pharmacy ethics and law, bioethics and religion, risk management and ethics, social inclusion and bioethics, and environmental ethics.

Author: Martin Solly
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748691707
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Why are doctors' prescriptions illegible and why is the language of the law considered impenetrable to outsiders? Need they be so? Is it more difficult for non-native speakers of English than native speakers to access the discourse of professions such as law and medicine? These are some of the questions covered by this book which uses the lens of stylistics to shed light on how the discourse of professional communities is used not just to convey meanings, but also to construct identity and demark membership. The volume focuses on the three domains of healthcare, law and education, as well as on the language of the new technologies, with the aim of showing how a knowledge of stylistics can provide the key for appropriate and acceptable language use, enabling successful communication and potential membership of professional communities.

Author: Ulla Connor
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027295042
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This book explores the structure and use of academic and professional discourse through the lens of corpus linguistics. The goal of this book is to show how insights from corpus linguistic analyses can help us better understand how we use academic and professional language and help us find ways to better train newcomers to the genres used in various professional contexts. The contributions to this book show that specialized corpora of specific genres from a variety of fields allow us to make more relevant observations about the function and use of language for particular purposes. The specialized corpora examined include written and spoken academic genres, written and spoken business and legal genres, and written philanthropic genres. The book showcases a variety of approaches to analyzing the discourse of specialized corpora, and each chapter concludes with a reflection on the practical and pedagogical implications of the analysis.

Author: Sanford Schane
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441114629
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This comprehensive introduction to Language and the Law looks at the common areas of interaction between linguistics and the legal process. Each chapter presents a language issue or problem relevant to the law. This is then examined using excerpts from cases where judges in their decisions have had to confront that particular issue. Professor Schane considers each issue both from the legal point of view and from a linguistic point of view, to show how each are relevant to each other. Issues covered include: * Ambiguity * Vagueness * Metaphor * Legal fiction * Presuppositions * Leading questions * Legal hearsay The book requires no previous legal or linguistic background, and all concepts and notions from the two fields are explained in a non-technical manner. This fascinating introduction to Language and the Law will be of interest to students and academics encountering this area for the first time. Student friendly features include: exercises, suggestions for further reading, glossary and excerpts from relevant cases.