A synchronic and diachronic study of American and British legal discourses for ESP in legal education based on corpus linguistics.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project has investigated the historical progress of British and American legal discourses over 200 years and clarified the synchronic and diachronic differences of these two legal discourses. The research has been done within the framework five dimensions proposed in Biber(1988), and clarified the lexico-grammatical features which have been characteristically used in British and American legal discourses over 200 year. This project has found that American and British legal discourses have followed uniquely different historical progress, and that 1) noun phrases have become more elaborate and complicated, 2) nominalizations have been on the increase, and 3) passivizations have been on the decrease.