ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an analysis of the advantages of using corpora of legal texts in order to verify whether or not plain language has impinged on the way such texts are written today. The rest of the chapter is devoted to an analysis of two corpora of legislative texts written 50 years apart, the first in 1970, the second in 2020. Numerous linguistic features are examined to see whether plain language principles have been applied in the more recent texts. These features include sentence length, the frequency of typically legalese words such as aforesaid or hereby, the adoption of gender-neutral language, the ratio between passives and actives, and the frequency of the modal auxiliary shall. The conclusion is that the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel in Westminster has indeed absorbed the principles of plain language, producing texts that are easier to read than they were 50 years earlier.
