Abstract
With specific communicative purposes, legal genres take specialized communicative practices and serve specific functions in different legal contexts. Using a wide range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies, such as genre theory, semiotics, ethnography, corpus linguistics and pragmatics, genre analysis in legal settings has explored various aspects of legal discourse. However, the interpersonal metafunction which deals with interactions between writer/reader and speaker/audience in legal genres remains under-researched. The present volume is an excellent contribution to the study on interpersonal features in legal genres, aiming to bridge this research gap and to extend the notion of interpersonality in the field.
The volume opens with an introductory chapter in which the editors rightly point out that the interpersonal features in specific genres are determined by text-internal and text-external factors, making it no easy task to explore the realization and distribution of interpersonality across legal genres. The following 14 chapters are organized into three parts, presenting studies that explore three types of interaction: among legal experts, between legal experts and mixed audiences, and between legal experts and lay people. Based on the perspective of genre theory, the contributors address their views on interpersonal features using a variety of theoretical frameworks and combined approaches.
The first part includes five chapters dealing with four genres employed in expert contexts. Davide Mazzi examines interpersonal positioning in the judgments at crucial moments of judicial decision-making in common law and non-common law contexts. Tarja Salmi-Tolonen analyses a European Union (EU) directive, exploring the persuasive function of the interpersonal and interdiscursive strategies used by EU to communicate with its member states, their legislators and judiciaries, and other recipients. Maria Angeles Orts Llopis presents a study on charter parties, that is, the contracts made between ship owners and the persons who charter a vessel, and unravels the interactions between the parties. Michele Sala focuses on interrogative formulations in academic research articles in legal settings, revealing a dialogical framework between writer and readers. Christoph Hafner examines interpersonal resources in a barrister’s opinion. Hafner compares the opinions written by experienced barristers and postgraduate law students, attempting to demonstrate that conveying an appropriate professional voice to readers is an important issue.
The second part deals with discursive interactions between legal specialists and the general public. In this context, the interpersonal function needs to serve the communicative purposes of heterogeneous audiences holding different command of the terminology and the legal background. Vijay K. Bhatia finds that the interpersonal constraints and tensions in statutory writing result in its contradictory nature. Bhatia offers two versions of the legislative provisions, a simplified version for ordinary citizens and an ‘easified’ version for specialist audiences. Carmen Sancho Guinda analyses distinctive interpersonal features of the legal decisions on aviation accidents and incidents issued by the National Transportation Safety Board of the USA. Faced with mixed readership, the writers use a number of interpersonal resources to reconcile accessibility and informativeness. Christopher Williams investigates the interpersonal components of guides intended for people involved in drafting legislation. Ignacio Vazquez-Orta explores the interpersonal rhetoric of domain name arbitration awards by the World Intellectual Property Organization in terms of authoritativeness, interpersonal way of reasoning and the use of legalese. Drawing on a corpus of US patents, Ismael Arinas Pellon presents a study on interpersonality in which he explores the persuasion strategies used by patent drafters to overcome the objections of two types of people: those concerned with validity and those worried about infringement.
The third part comprises four chapters devoted to interactions between legal experts and lay people. In this context, the legal specialists have a twin task: to obtain cooperation from lay people and to involve lay people in the discourses of the law. Ruth Breeze describes how lawyers make use of relational features to project an appropriate and professional identity in letters of advice and opinion. Maurizio Gotti analyses the interpersonal strategies adopted by mediators in mediation discourse, a form of dispute resolution. Patrizia Anesa investigates the issue of jury communication of knowledge asymmetry, in particular the delivery of instruction to lay jurors in American courtrooms. By reviewing the generic pattern of jury instructions widely used in US courts, Anesa examines the way experts and lay people interact in the jury instruction phase of trials. Isabel Corona explores interpersonality in press releases about international commercial arbitration cases between corporations from perspectives of individual, social and dialogic voice. The dialogic resources are utilized to argue for the legitimacy of the company’s actions and reactions against the other party’s actions and reactions.
As the study of professional genres has moved from a focus on formal structures to a focus on contextual factors in interpreting discourse, the analysis of interpersonal features has acquired greater importance. This is so because people use language not simply to exchange information, but to offer a credible presentation of themselves and to establish and maintain social links with others. Legal genre texts are no exception as the chapters in the volume convincingly illustrate how legal genres are engaging with the construct of interpersonality. The studies in the book all draw on empirical data, although their methodological approaches are diverse. They are all solid and cogently argued research studies presented and edited in a clear, systematic and accessible manner. In terms of organization, the overall structure of the book is highly effective, with a strong and insightful introduction followed by chapters assembled under three parts.
To sum up, this innovative work is a valuable addition to the fields of discourse analysis and applied linguistics in general, and legal genre analysis in particular. It will appeal to scholars and practitioners who take an interest in pragmatic analysis of legal communication from the perspective of interpersonality in the legal domain.