Language and Law in Professional Discourse: Issues and Perspectives

Vijay K. Bhatia · Giuliana Elena Garzone · Girolamo Tessuto

Mrt. 2014 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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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.

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Vijay K. Bhatia retired as Professor from the City University of Hong Kong, and is now Adjunct Professor at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, and at Macquarie University, Australia. He is also the founding President of the LSP and Professional Communication Association for the Asia-Pacific Rim. His research interests include critical genre analysis, ESP and professional communication. Two of his books, Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings and Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based View, are widely used in genre theory and practice.

Giuliana Garzone is Full Professor of English, Linguistics and Translation at the University of Milan, Italy. Her main field of investigation is specialized discourse in its different domains, which she has explored in a discourse analytical perspective, often integrating it with corpus linguistics. She has co-ordinated several research projects, and published extensively on legal language, scientific discourse, and business communication with first-class Italian and international publishers. Her other research interests are in translation and interpreting studies.

Rita Salvi is Full Professor of English, Linguistics and Translation at the ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome, Italy. Her research interests include general and applied linguistics, text and genre analysis, intercultural discourse for academic and professional purposes, the analysis of specialized languages. She serves as a reviewer for journals, book publishers and research funding organizations.

Girolamo Tessuto is Associate Professor of English, Linguistics and Translation at the University of Naples 2, Italy. His research interests are in applied linguistics, genre analysis of academic, institutional and professional discourses in legal contexts. His published academic work includes research monographs and several publications appearing as research papers, book chapters and co-edited volumes. He is a member of the editorial boards of various international linguistic journals.

Christopher Williams is Full Professor of English, Linguistics and Translation at the University of Foggia, Italy, where he is also Head of the University’s Language Centre. He has published works on the verb phrase, tense, aspect and modality in English, but his main research interest in recent years has been in legal English, in particular with reference to the plain language movement. He has also co-edited a number of volumes in the field of legal English with international publishers. He is Chief Editor of the journal ESP Across Cultures.