ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the main features that have been attributed to the variety usually known as 'legal English'. It provides a review of descriptive accounts by other influential scholars, including David Mellinkoff and P. Tiersma. D. Crystal and D. Davy's description of legal language predates large-scale corpus analysis in linguistics. The chapter suggests some ways in which the analysis of legal language can be enhanced using such techniques. Crystal and Davy begin their account of sentence grammar with the observation that sentences in legal documents are often long and grammatically complex. Tiersma also notes that semantic relations that hold between vocabulary items in a given semantic field can be specific to legal language. The established perception of the layout of legal documents is that they are dense on the page, lack punctuation, and appear formal and archaic because they use fonts and devices associated with antiquarian styles of presentation and publication.
