Sociolinguistic and grammatical aspects of English company registration discourse

Abstract

The paper addresses the issue of complexity of legal communication English in the context of its stylistic variantivity. The research aimed at establishing whether the variable of genre and selected sociolinguistic factors affect the grammar of legal texts, and specifically the quantitative distribution of verbal structures. The analysis fits in the paradigmatic approach to generic and sociolinguistic studies, where the distribution of discrete units is presented in quantitative terms. The operationalisation of the research involved the identification of the relevant linguistic material in the corpus, its statistical processing and conducting relevant R analysis which was to unveil potential correlations. The findings show that the legal texts making up the corpus are not stylistically homogenous; the varied provenance of the source texts (from a diatopic and diachronic perspective, and in terms of genre profile) affects the stylistic structure/grammar of the texts; the same grammatical categories tend to be discriminative for various categories of texts. The strong point of the research lies in addressing legal communication within the realm of secondary genres, which – for practical reasons – are underrepresented in legilinguistic studies, constituting a significant yet problematic domain from an intra- and inter-linguistic perspective. The findings obtained in the analysis and patterns emerging will be of practical use in multi-national, institutional environments, where English is used as a lingua franca in corporate communication. Moreover, the conclusions drawn are a good starting point for studies on legal translation in professional settings, including the didactic perspective.