2.3 Gales
Tammy Gales. (2012). Review — Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English: A corpus-based study. International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse 2(3), 118-128.
Abstract: Stanislaw Goźdź-Roszkowski’s Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English: A Corpus-based Study is one of the newest volumes (22) in the Łódź Studies in Language series, edited by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk. This book, which contains seven chapters, a bibliography, two appendices, and an index, presents a very well-written, thorough examination of variation in legal language. Goźdź-Roszkowski’s primary goal is to “demonstrate that the universe of legal texts involves not only different situational characteristics of legal genres, such as different modes (speech, writing) and different production circumstances in which legal genres are created, different participants and the relations among them, or different communicative purposes, but that legal texts differ dramatically in terms of their linguistic characteristics” (p.11). By comparing legal language through a variety of corpus-based approaches, Goźdź-Roszkowski successfully demonstrates that what has traditionally been treated “as a largely monolithic phenomenon” (p.15), is, in reality, composed of a variety of genres that each contain highly systematic patterns of language use.
Category: Volume 2
