An investigation of the lexico-grammatical profile of English legal- lay language

The article presents a study on the lexico-grammar of genre ofEnglish legal-lay language (Tiersma 1999), using English subcorpus theCorIELLS corpus (Busso forthcoming). explores four grammaticalconstructions (in Goldberg 2006’s Construction Grammar sense): nominalisationsheading prepositional phrase attachments, modal verb constructions, participialreduced relative and passive constructions. Specifically, we usecollostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch 2013), followed by vocabulary analysisusing core as reference (Brezina Gablasova 2015), anda comparative frequency with corpora legal general-domain written prose. Results this first part foreground how is quantitatively different from both neighbouring genres, suggestingthat it might be considered “blended” genre. We further explore data in termsof accessibility for speakers, readability metrics survey Englishparticipants. Both methods show that at an intermediatelevel complexity between jargon prose; however, wefurther note generally underestimate speakers’ ability tocomprehend language.