An analysis of legal speech acts in English Contract Law. 'It is hereby performed'

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the language used in legal speech acts in legislative texts in the field of English Contract Law as the object of study. It points to a division of legal English in subdomains with 'the language of the law' as a particular sublanguage. Interest centers on regulative and constitutive functions, and an analysis of realization patterns of directive acts is reported. The findings show that the language of the law characteristically selects patterns of directives which differ in level of directness from the patterns typically selected in everyday conversational English. This difference can be explained with reference to 'felicity conditions'.

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