Grammatical means of textual cohesion in appellate court decisions

Authors

  • Zuzana Nadova P.J.Safarik University in Kosice

Keywords:

textual cohesion, reference, substitution, ellipsis, legal English

Abstract

The submitted paper deals with analysis of grammatical means of textual cohesion in English in a specific genre of legal register, i.e. in appellate court decisions. The theoretical framework of analysis is the theory of textual cohesion introduced by Halliday and Hasan in their work Cohesion in English (1976), which considers only intersentence cohesive ties to be textually cohesive and which distinguishes four categories of grammatical cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. In the analysed texts, all the instances of these four categories of grammatical cohesion are identified and statistically evaluated. The aim of the analysis is twofold. The first goal of research is to find out what kinds of cohesive devices appear with the highest frequency. Another focus of analysis is to find out whether the grammatical means of textual cohesion under analysis contribute to the stylistic qualities of the analysed texts and make them unambiguous and clear enough for interpretation. The findings of the analysis as well as their subsequent comparison with other registers indicate that the most frequent grammatical means of textual cohesion, namely demonstrative reference and additive conjunction, significantly contribute to precision, formality and logical organization of the analysed genre of legal English.

DOI: 10.20420/rlfe.2015.0010

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Author Biography

Zuzana Nadova, P.J.Safarik University in Kosice

Zuzana Nadova is currently a PhD student enrolled in the doctoral programme in “British and American Studies” at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia where she teaches Business English, Terminology of International Economic Relations and Translation, and Legal English. At the same time, she is also enrolled in the PhD programme in “Linguistics” at Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In 2011, she successfully defended her master thesis entitled “Distribution of Non-finite Clauses in Acts of Parliament vs. Appellate Judgments”. She is the author of the article “Distribution of Semi-clause Constructions in Acts of Parliament vs. Appellate Judgments” published in Comparative Legilinguistics. International Journal for Legal Communication,18(2014), pp. 9-25.

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Published

2015-11-25

How to Cite

Nadova, Z. (2015). Grammatical means of textual cohesion in appellate court decisions. Revista De Lenguas Para Fines Específicos, 21(2), 8–47. Retrieved from https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/392

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 2 (2015): Revista de lenguas para fines específicos

Section

Artículos/Articles

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