Language and the Law: International Outlooks

The Editors: Krzysztof Kredens received his M.A. in English Studies and Ph.D. in English Linguistics from the University of Łódź (Poland). He is now a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the School of Languages and Social Sciences at Aston University (UK). His main academic interests are in forensic linguistics and social applications of linguistics including legal translation and community interpreting. Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski holds an M.A. in English Studies and Ph.D. in English Linguistics from the University of Łódź (Poland), where he lectures on English Language and Linguistics. His research interests are primarily in corpus-based analysis of legal texts and also include register variation, genre analysis, LSP phraseology, and specialist translation and terminology.

• Contents: Maurizio Gotti: Legal discourse in multilingual and multicultural contexts – Susan Šarčević: Making multilingualism work in the enlarged European Union – Agnieszka Doczekalska: Production and application of multilingual law. The principle of equality of authentic texts and the value of subsequent translation – Anne Lise Kjær: Legal translation in the European Union: A research field in need of a new approach – Diana Yankova: How harmonious is harmonization of legislation? On the concept of term equivalence – Luciana Carvalho: Translating contracts and agreements from a corpus linguistics perspective – Ruth Morris: Monoglots and polyglots, or principles and application: Dealing with linguistic diversity in English-speaking legal systems – Chris Heffer: Judgement in court: Evaluating participants in courtroom discourse – Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka: Linguistic aspects of deontic shall in the legal context – Ioana Costache: Nineteenth-century Romanian contracts for works: a case study – Jan Chovanec: The same though different: tobacco health warnings in European Community Member States – Victor M. Gonzáles Ruiz: Changing the law on marriage: The semantics of tolerance – Anne Wagner: Mapping legal knowledge – Jarosław Wyrembak: Exploring the limitations of statutory interpretation: some remarks on Polish Supreme Court’s approach to the interpretation of selected criminal law provisions – Georgina Heydon: The importance of being (in)formal: discourse strategies in police interviews with children – Lorna Fadden: Discourse differences of Aboriginal and Caucasian suspects in police interviews – Cheng Le/King Kui Sin: Contrastive analysis of Chinese and American court judgments – Aleksandra Matulewska: The macrostructure and register of English and Polish testaments – Richard Creech: Missing the mark: Assessing trademarks for distinctiveness and descriptiveness in Europe’s multilingual environment – Syûgo Hotta: Morphosyntactic structure of Japanese trademarks and their distinctiveness: A new model for linguistic analysis of trademarks – Sue Blackwell/Willem Meijs/Jess Shapero: Texts of murder and martyrdom – Burns Cooper: Idea density as a marker of authorship: A preliminary study – Godfrey A. Steele: Course content for language of the law and interpretation of the law.

«Globalization of commerce and the expansion of the EU have made successful communication among legal cultures ever more essential. At the same time, the study of language and law within various legal cultures has begun to reveal a set of communicative failures in important legal events that must be addressed worldwide. This excellent collection of essays displays the state-of-the-art in addressing both of these challenges. It is certain not only to enlighten, but to stimulate the next generation of research.» (Lawrence M. Solan, Brooklyn Law School)«(...) the book is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the language and law bibliography. The editors did not shy away from including articles on new and pioneering topics, offering an interesting overview of new developments in forensic linguistics.» (Karolina Jarmolowska, Translation Ireland)