Frameworks for Discursive Actions and Practices of the Law

Jan Engberg · Girolamo Tessuto

Jan 2019 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This volume provides descriptive and interpretive insights into the ‘living’ usage of language and other semiotic modes in building and performing the law across academic, professional and institutional contexts, where issues arise from the meaning and function of legal texts, discourse and genre in constituting and enabling conventions, albeit dynamically, and account for the socially and (inter)culturally influenced forms of discursive actions and practices. The twenty contributions included here weave significant contexts and situations for legal discourse and practice into a tight thread, and justify selected topic areas through a variety of approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and procedures.

As such, this publication is multidimensional and multiperspectival in its design and implementation of key issues confronting discursive actions and practices of the law, and provides an invaluable resource for academics in a wider range of disciplines, including linguistics, applied linguistics and communication studies. It will also be of interest to students of interdisciplinary discourse analysis.

About the author

Vijay K. Bhatia retired as Professor from the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong, and is now an Adjunct Professor in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University, Greece. Some of his research projects include Analyzing Genre-bending in Corporate Disclosure Documents, and International Arbitration Practice: A Discourse Analytical Study, in which he led research teams from more than 20 countries. His publications include Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings, Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based View, and Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Communication, which are widely used in genre theory and practice.

Jan Engberg is Professor of Knowledge Communication at the School of Communication and Culture of the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main areas of research interest are the study of texts and genres in the academic field, cognitive aspects of domain specific discourse and the relations between specialized knowledge and text formulation. He is co-editor of the international journal Fachsprache and a member of the editorial and advisory boards of a substantial number of international scholarly journals.

Girolamo Tessuto is Professor of English Language and Translation at the Department of Law of the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Italy, where he is also Director of the Centre for Research in Language and Law (CRILL). His research interests include (critical) discourse and genre analysis in academic, professional and institutional contexts of law, academic and professional discourses of healthcare and medicine, and professional communication in the area of law, among others. His publications include research monographs and several research papers, book chapters, and co-edited volumes. He is an editorial board member of various international English linguistics journals and chief editor of the Legal Discourse and Communication international series.