Old English wills

Abstract

Abstract Following Bhatia’s model of the ‘language of the law’, this paper treats wills and statutes as representatives of the genre ‘written formal legislative legal documents’. In an overview of the publications on Present-day English (PDE) legal writing, I point out that only statutes have been analyzed with corpus-linguistic methods ( Section 1 ). Quantitative data about Old English (OE) legal genres do not exist; OE wills have been investigated only from a sociohistorical point of view ( Section 2 ). This research situation requires a new approach to the study of OE wills, which is quantitative-qualitative and corpus-based. The corpus consists of 23 wills, amounting to 10,330 words ( Section 3 ). Its analysis is presented in two parts. In the first part, a new model of the text structure of OE wills is proposed; its constituents are described and illustrated by examples. In the second part, the linguistic features sentence length, sentence structure in terms of the number of clauses per sentence and of the type and position of subordinate clauses in complex sentences, pronominal reference to the testator, and the categories of tense, mood, modality, and voice of the verbal syntagm are analyzed. The quantitative results are compared to the corresponding figures of PDE statutes. This comparison yields two sets of linguistic properties; one set is genre-specific, the other is period-specific ( Section 4 ). In Section 5 , the results of the paper are summarized, and a future research agenda is derived from them.

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