Complementing other studies on judicial discourse, this book investigates previously unexplored areas, focusing on the realisation of Concession in the genre of judgment. In addition to providing a review of approaches to concessivity as well as legal and linguistic perspectives on argumentation, the analysis draws on genre studies and follows a genre-based view of legal language. It shows the way in which the Concessive relation is deployed by last-instance courts, as revealed by an examination of EU and Polish judgments. In what constitutes a pioneering attempt to identify tripartite Concessive patterns in written data, the author breaks away from the traditional view of written legal discourse seen as static and monologic communication. Instead, she offers insights into the linguistic construction of judicial argumentation, seen as a “mute dialogue” with the addressee, highlighting recurrent argumentative schemata and related discourse signals and functions. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the analysis demonstrates that the dialogic model of Concession, designed as a tool for an examination of talk-in-interaction, can be successfully applied in an investigation of written data. The book is aimed at students and researchers with interests in legal discourse, genre analysis and argumentation studies.

This edited book analyses the relationship between discourse and conflict, exploring both how language may be used to promote conflict and also how it is possible to avoid or mitigate conflict through tactical use of language. Bringing together contributions from both established scholars and emerging voices in the fields of Discourse Analysis and Conflict Studies, it argues for a discourse approach to making sense of conflict and disagreement in the modern world. ‘Conflict’ is understood here as having a national or global focus and consequences, and includes verbal aggression and hate speech, as well as physical confrontation between political and ethnic groups or states over values, claims to status, power and resources. Themes explored in the volume include the language of conflict, hate speech in online and offline media, and discourse and peace-building, and the chapters examine various national contexts, including Lithuania, Brazil, Belgium, North Macedonia, Sri Lanka, the USA and Afghanistan. The chapters cover conflict-related topics within the fields of Political Science, International Relations, Sociology, Media Studies, and Applied Linguistics, and the book will be of interest to students, researchers and experts in these and related fields, as well as professionals in conflict and peace-building/peace-keeping.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.

Genre theory has focused primarily on the analysis of generic constructs, with increasing attention to and emphasis on the contexts in which such genres are produced, interpreted, and used to achieve objectives, often giving the impression as if producing genres is an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. The result of this focus is that there has been very little attention paid to the ultimate outcomes of these genre-based discursive activities, which are more appropriately viewed as academic, institutional, organizational, and professional actions and practices, which are invariably non-discursive, though often achieved through discursive means. It was this objective in mind that the book develops an approach to a more critical and deeper understanding of interdiscursive professional voices and actions. Critical Genre Analysis as a theory of discursive performance is thus an attempt to be as objective as possible, rigorous in analytical endeavour, using a multiperspective and multidimensional methodological framework taking into account interdiscursive aspects of genre construction to make it increasingly explanatory to demystify discursive performance in a range of professional contexts.

Translators, law students or legal professionals who begin to deal with legal language face a bewildering variety of legal writings. Even though legal language has been examined from a multitude of perspectives, there are virtually no studies explicitly addressing variation in legal English in terms of recurrent linguistic patterns. This book is a first step towards filling this gap. It provides a corpus-based linguistic description of variation among several selected legal genres, including vocabulary distribution and use (keywords), extended lexical expressions (lexical bundles), and lexico-syntactic co-occurrence patterns (multidimensional analysis). The findings are interpreted in functional terms in an attempt to provide an overall characterization of the most commonly encountered types of legal language.

Dissent in courts has always existed. It is natural and healthy that judges disagree on legal issues of a certain importance and difficulty. The question is if it is reasonable to conceal dissent. Not every legal system allows judges to explain their disagreement to the public in a separate opinion attached to the judgment of the court. Most constitutional courts do. This book presents a comparative analysis of the practice of judicial dissent in constitutional courts from the perspective of the civil law tradition. It discusses the theoretical background, presents the history of the institution and today�s practice, thus laying down the basis for an accurate consideration of the phenomenon from a legal perspective.

This book provides grammar exercises for students working with a teacher. The book can be used in any order depending on the personal needs of the students and the exercises are not arranged in order of increasing difficulty, but are marked with asterisks to indicate their relative degree of difficulty.

The book argues that international investment law is a structured body of law based on uniform principles of investment protection.

Phraseological Units: basic concepts and their applicationPhraseology, an established concept in central and eastern Europe, has in recent years received increasing attention in the English-speaking world. It has long been clear to language learners and teachers that a native speaker's competence in a language goes well beyond a lexico-semantic knowledge of the individual words and the grammatical rules for combining them into sentences; linguistic competence also includes a familiarity with restricted collocations (like break the rules), idioms (like spill the beans in a non-literal sense) and proverbs (like Revenge is sweet), as well as the ability to produce or understand metaphorical interpretations. The first five papers of this volume set out to define the basic phraseological concepts collocation, idiom, proverb, metaphor and the related one of compound (-word). The remaining six papers explore a series of issues involving analytic, quantitative, computational and lexicographic aspects of phraseological units. The volume, as a whole, is a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction to this blossoming field of linguistics.