Stylistic Features of the Legal Discourse

Abstract

Every profession, every occupation, for example architecture, journalism, medicine, sports, has its specialised language features. These features may be viewed at the phonological, semantic, syntactic, lexical and graphological levels, among others. The language features identified with certain professions are most of the time incomprehensible to the ‘uninitiated’.  Particularly intriguing, however, in the language of professions, are those features that have crystallised more or less into rules of discourse. These rules come out as what could be distinguished as professional register. The
aim of this paper is to highlight the professional register of legal discourse. However, we shall be limiting our analysis to such stylistic features as are manifested in the lexical, the syntactic and the graphological peculiarities of the legal language.