{"title":"Old English law-codes","authors":"L. Moessner","doi":"10.1075/jhp.00035.moe","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Law language is a cover-term for different genres of legal texts. The genre of law is characterized as being written, legislative and formal. Quantitative studies on the textual and linguistic structure of Old English (oe) law-codes are lacking so far, but both aspects are analysed in this paper on the basis of a corpus of about 20,000 words. The results of the quantitative-qualitative analysis are compared to oe wills on the one hand, and to Early Modern English (emode) and Present-Day English (pde) statutes on the other. The synchronic comparison of oe law-codes and oe wills reveals that the text structure and the linguistic profile of the genres are very similar. The conclusion to be drawn from this result is that genre properties largely determine the textual and linguistic profile of texts in a given period. The diachronic comparisons show marked differences in the linguistic profile of oe law-codes and statutes of later periods.","PeriodicalId":54081,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2020-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Historical Pragmatics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00035.moe","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
Abstract Law language is a cover-term for different genres of legal texts. The genre of law is characterized as being written, legislative and formal. Quantitative studies on the textual and linguistic structure of Old English (oe) law-codes are lacking so far, but both aspects are analysed in this paper on the basis of a corpus of about 20,000 words. The results of the quantitative-qualitative analysis are compared to oe wills on the one hand, and to Early Modern English (emode) and Present-Day English (pde) statutes on the other. The synchronic comparison of oe law-codes and oe wills reveals that the text structure and the linguistic profile of the genres are very similar. The conclusion to be drawn from this result is that genre properties largely determine the textual and linguistic profile of texts in a given period. The diachronic comparisons show marked differences in the linguistic profile of oe law-codes and statutes of later periods.
期刊介绍：
The Journal of Historical Pragmatics provides an interdisciplinary forum for theoretical, empirical and methodological work at the intersection of pragmatics and historical linguistics. The editorial focus is on socio-historical and pragmatic aspects of historical texts in their sociocultural context of communication (e.g. conversational principles, politeness strategies, or speech acts) and on diachronic pragmatics as seen in linguistic processes such as grammaticalization or discoursization. Contributions draw on data from literary or non-literary sources and from any language. In addition to contributions with a strictly pragmatic or discourse analytical perspective, it also includes contributions with a more sociolinguistic or semantic approach.
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