This book explores the techniques and discursive strategies that are typical of the communicative interactions between professionals and laymen in a jury trial. It also investigates the complex relationship that emerges between written and oral communication in different phases of the trial. The analysis takes into account the many nuances that define these dynamics and the various possibilities that the jurors have to intervene in the process, particularly in the light of recent procedural developments. Special attention is devoted to the observation of the specific strategies adopted to illustrate legal ideas and concepts to the jurors according to the speakers' various communicative purposes. By adopting a discourse analytical perspective which combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the book highlights the hybridity of the language used in court and the combination of different styles and registers.
Drawing on representative corpora of transcripts from over 100 English criminal jury trials, this stimulating new book explores the nature of 'legal-lay discourse', or the language used by legal professionals before lay juries. Careful analyses of genres such as witness examination and the judge's summing-up reveal a strategic tension between a desire to persuade the jury and the need to conform to legal constraints. The book also suggests ways of managing this tension linguistically to help, not hinder, the jury.
This volume offers insights into the ways in which plain language has influenced the language of the law in the United Kingdom, critically reflecting on its historical development and future directions. The book opens with an overview of the theoretical frameworks underpinning plain language and a brief history of plain language initiatives as a foundation from which to outline ongoing debates on the opportunities and challenges of using plain language in the legal domain. The volume details strands where plain language has had considerable impact thus far on legal English in the UK, notably in legislative drafting, but it also explores areas in which plain language has made fewer inroads, such as the language of court judgments and that of online terms and conditions. The book looks ahead to unpack highly topical areas within the plain language debate, including the question of design and visualisation and the ramifications of digitalisation, contributing to ongoing conversations on the importance of plain language both in the UK and beyond. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the intersection of language and the law as well as related disciplinary areas such as applied linguistics and English for Specific Purposes.
The book is an edited volume of carefully selected articles by eminent scholars focusing on the specialist knowledge transmission through genre variation, particularly on the issues of standardization and hybridity. The main focus was to analyse discursive popularization in the contexts and domains of natural sciences, law, and commerce, viewed in a diachronic perspective. The scholars involved have concentrated their studies on the creative transformation, hybridization, and even bending of genres used to popularise scientific, legal and commercial discourse for different communicative purposes and audiences, thus extending the conventional genre boundaries to disseminate specialized knowledge. The proliferation of specialized knowledge has indeed created a growing need to convey expert knowledge to a variety of addressees, with different levels of shared understanding and expertise. Such disciplinary knowledge can only be conveyed through various subtle manipulations of generic conventions keeping in mind the aims, the users, the media, the social contexts, and the domain with which specific knowledge is associated.
PAPERS IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE ON ESP: Editorial (1-3); Translating the Sufi dictionary into English: Challenges and constraints (5-30); Go ask Alice! The voice of medicine and the voice of lifeworld on a website (31-56); CLIL and ESP: Synergies and mutual inspiration (57-76); The popularisation of science via TED talks (77-106); Supporting multilingualism in academic writing (107-130); UK University websites: A multimodal, corpus-based analysis (131-152); 'Re-scaling' the discourse of immigrant integration: The role of definitions (153-172); An attempt at redefining legal English contexts (173-191)
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.
The Routledge Handbook of Intralingual Translation provides the first comprehensive overview of intralingual translation, or the rewording or rewriting of a text. This Handbook aims to examine intralingual translation from every possible angle. The introduction gives an overview of the theoretical, political, and ideological issues involved and is followed by the first section which investigates intralingual translation from a diachronic perspective covering the modernization of classical texts. Subsequent sections consider different dialects and registers and intralingual translation from one language mode to another, explore concepts such as self-translating, transediting, and the role of copyeditors, and investigate the increasing interest in the role of intralingual translation and second language learning. Final sections examine recent developments in intralingual translation such as the subtitling of speech for the hard-of-hearing, simultaneous Easy Language interpreting, and respeaking in parliamentary debates. By providing an in-depth study on intralingual translation, the Handbook sheds light on other important areas of translation that are often bypassed, including publishing practices, authorship, and ideological constraints. Authored by a range of established and new voices in the field, this is the essential guide to intralingual translation for advanced students and researchers of translation studies.
This book investigates the evolution of economic discourse from fully specialised texts towards popularisation. Popularising texts on economics and business-related matters has hitherto been a neglected and under-explored area of enquiry, and yet it deserves attention and study on account of the new fascinating insights it offers into specialised language and discourse. The present book explores this under-researched area via the qualitative analysis of a modern genre, namely newspapers on the web. In particular, it scrutinises authentic extracts principally drawn from The Guardian Online in order to show, on the one hand, the popularising effect of the Internet on business and economic discourse, and, on the other hand, the realistic vocabulary currently used in economic and professional jargon. The introductory chapter discusses the popularisation of specialised text at large and of new media discourse in particular. It describes this phenomenon as a ‘reformulation process’ whereby specialised knowledge is transformed into everyday or lay knowledge, and also as a ‘recontextualisation process’ whereby popularisation discourse is adapted to the appropriateness conditions of the new genres and to the constraints of the media employed. Popularisation, it is claimed, implies relevant changes not only in terms of terminological simplifications and adaptations to the public’s prior knowledge, but also in terms of the roles undertaken by the participants in the communicative event. The remaining chapters are organised into thematic units whose topics range from global economy, economic growth, and financial crisis to business management, employment, and sales. This part provides an in-depth investigation of various topics related to the economics and business worlds, combined with systematic explanations of linguistic phenomena at various language levels, from morphology to syntax, semantics, and the lexicon. In this book, the lexicon of ESP is offered in a fresh, less formal style, which will attract younger and non-expert readers alongside experts and professionals. The book is of considerable interest to students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, lecturers, professors, entrepreneurs, specialists, and to those scholars who investigate ESP and its popularisation.
This book provides a state-of-the-art account of past and current research in the interface between linguistics and law. It outlines the range of legal areas in which linguistics plays an increasing role and describes the tools and approaches used by linguists and lawyers in this vibrant new field. Through a combination of overview chapters, case studies, and theoretical descriptions, the volume addresses areas such as the history and structure of legal languages, its meaning and interpretation, multilingualism and language rights, courtroom discourse, forensic identification, intellectual property and linguistics, and legal translation and interpretation. Encyclopedic in scope, the handbook includes chapters written by experts from every continent who are familiar with linguistic issues that arise in diverse legal systems, including both civil and common law jurisdictions, mixed systems like that of China, and the emerging law of the European Union.
