Stylistic evaluation of legal documents
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Date
2014
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University of Management and Technology
Abstract
The present study is a genre evaluation of Pakistani legal documents in comparison with international legal documents. The core objective of the study is to identify the genre features of legal documents to help the professional lawyers know the features of written legal discourse to improve their professional writing skills. Further, the present research aims to quantify the linguistic features of legal documents and to suggest some practical ways to ESP course designers for designing effective English language course for EFL users in legal domain. The researcher has selected six legal documents as sample; two court judgements, two agreements and two international treaties. Descriptive quantitative research methodology was applied to measure the linguistic features of written legal discourse. The focus of the study was to evaluate the documents at Graphological, Lexical, Syntactic, Semantic, Pragmatic, Discourse levels. These categories were further divided into linguistic features and every feature was quantified using frequency as information analysis tool to deal with discreet data. This analysis was presented through charts and tables. The findings revealed that the repetition and over use of certain linguistic features i.e. synonymy, legal jargons and complex and long sentences are the hallmark of legal documents. These linguistic features should be dealt carefully while teaching English as foreign language to yield better results in improving reading comprehension and legal writing skills of professional lawyers and the students of law.
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Keywords
M.Phil Thesis, Legal Documents