ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the Systemic Functional Linguistics hypotheses related to the interconnectedness between systemic choices in discourse and contextual variables. Precisely, focus is put on the study of hypotactic enhancing clauses in the legal genre of international treaties. The aim is to show how the systemic choices related to the semantic relations of these constructions are conditioned by the bipartite structure of treaties, which reflect the genre conventions of treaty drafting. After analysing a corpus of ten treaties, the study shows that, indeed, legal drafters opt for different hypotactic enhancing patterns depending on the communicative goals of each treaty section.
