ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates binomials, an area of phraseology which is often singled out as a typical feature of legal language. These are coordinated pairs of the same word-class, for example bread and butter, man and wife, grant and give, quick and easy, etc. Using comprehensive corpora of acts passed in the first decade of the new millennium (2001-2010), the chapter investigates binomials in legislation produced by the UK and the Scottish Parliaments. The most frequent binomials are classified into semantic fields, which illuminate the question which area of meaning is most conducive to binomials in both corpora. The chapter then looks at the motivations for creating a lexical pair, paying special attention to binomials unmotivated semantically. The unshared binomials can reveal topics on which the two parliaments concentrated in the naughts but they may also lead us to understand the stylistic preferences in legal drafting which go back to the separate historical roots of the law in Scotland and England.
