ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the semantic, grammatical and textual features of legal discourse in English and Arabic. Legal English, as a specialized language, has its own distinctive lexical features, its own legalese, just like media with its own journalese. Legal vocabulary is a vocabulary of possibilities purportedly comprising a comprehensive system of meanings that are internal or latent within the lexicon itself. Hiltunen comments on the issue of vocabulary by stating that adjectives in legal English are fairly scarce, nouns tend to be abstract rather than concrete and verbs are selected from a fairly small number of lexical sets. The English law was affected by the Roman Church in the Middle Ages whose dominant language was Latin. Many legal English terms which are common today are borrowed from French. English legal language has many words that are dependent on the culture and legal system.
