ABSTRACT
Expressions with the fact that are common in spoken and written English, with nearly 13,000 occurrences in the British National Corpus. This chapter analyses such expressions when they are used in legal language, with the help of their translation equivalents in German. Two recent studies discuss the use of constructions with the fact that in legal English and their counterparts in other languages, namely Gozdz-Roszkowski and Pontrandolfo for Italian, and Zelenakova for French. The chapter is a modest attempt to build on the foundations laid by these two studies. It then reviews some of the work on the fact that in English and in contrastive studies, introduces the corpus and methodology, and extends the data to legal German. The chapter further considers the implications of the corpus data for the analysis of expressions with the fact that, for English and German in contrast, for legal language and legal reasoning, for plain legal language, and for phraseology.
