-ING CLAUSES AND THEIR FUNCTIONS ACROSS LEGAL ENGLISH CORPORA: A COMPARATIVE GENRE-BASED STUDY

Zuzana Nadova

Authors

Zuzana Nadova Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Kosice, Slovakia Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands

Abstract

Abstract. The submitted paper aims to detect and examine any regularities in the employment of -ing clauses classified into two functional varieties (present participial and gerundial) across two corpora of British legal English: Acts of Parliament and Appellate Judgments. The main purpose of the presented genre-based descriptive study is to analyse -ing clauses and their minor structural and semantic variants taking into account their syntactic functions in the respective genre of legal English as well as the communicative purpose of their immediate co-text. The analysis shows that -ing clauses are used in highly genre specific ways, both formally and functionally speaking.

Keywords: gerund, present participle, legal English, linguistic communication

Resumen. Oraciones subordinadas encabezadas por gerundios y participios presentes y sus funciones en el corpus de inglés jurídico. Un estudio comparativo.

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el funcionamiento de oraciones subordinadas encabezadas por las formas no personales del verbo, específicamente por gerundios y participios presentes. El análisis se ha llevado a cabo en dos géneros de inglés jurídico: leyes parlamentarios y sentencias de segunda instancia. El análisis elaborado dentro de una perspectiva de género trata las oraciones subordinadas encabezada por gerundios y participios desde la perspectiva sintáctica y textual, tomando en cuenta sus variantes construccionales y semánticos y al mismo tiempo tratando de averiguar si existen algunas correspondencias entre las oraciones subordinadas encabezadas por gerundios y participios y otras características lingüísticas y comunicativas del texto. El análisis ha demostrado que las funciones de las oraciones subordinadas encabezadas por gerundios y participios se desempeñan de maneras específicas en los géneros de textos analizados en este estudio. Asimismo, las coocurrencias de ciertas características de la oración se adecuan a los objetivos retóricos del género indicado.

Palabras clave: gerundio, participio presente, inglés jurídico, comunicación lingüistica

Author Biography

Zuzana Nadova, Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Kosice, Slovakia Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands

Zuzana Nadova is currently a PhD student enrolled in the doctoral programme in «British and American Studies» at Pavol Jozef Å afárik University in KoÅ¡ice, Slovakia where she teaches Business English for Lawyers, Legal English and Terminology of International Economic Relations and Translation. She has also been participating in the VEGA research project dealing with Word-formation Characteristics of Standard Average European. At the same time, she is enrolled in the PhD programme in «Linguistics» at Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands where she has been working on her dissertation with a provisional title Cross-linguistic Research into Reduplication for the past two years. The author`s B.A thesis and M.A. thesis dealt with syntax of legal English (covering the topics of textual cohesion in legal English and Semi-clause constructions in legal English). Her research interests cover ESP, legal English, English syntax and recently also linguistic typology.

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