On Syntax In Legal Discourse

Recent developments in the academic/professional genre colony have mainly focused their attention on the study of salient features constituting the particular register of speech, such as special terminology, particular epistemic modes, and intertextual practices. Syntax, in academic speech, as well as in some special languages, hasn't been sufficiently investigated. The present paper analyzes the specificity of syntactic structures of texts belonging to a separate branch of science - Law - and in particular, texts belonging to different subregisters of Law - legislative, judicial, and documentary. The fundamental study of syntactic structures of a big corpus of different text-types on Law endeavors to map the legal genre due to a "specific syntax" inherent in legal discourse, challenging both linguists and lawyers to talk of a special legal register which is present across genres and which distinguishes Language for Law from other special languages.