This volume reflects the latest work of scholars specialising in the linguistic and legal aspects of normative texts across languages (English, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish) and law systems. Like other domains of specialised language use, legal discourse is subject to the converging pressures of internationalisation and of emerging practices that destabilise well-established norms and routines. In an integrated, interdependent context, supranational laws, rules and procedures are gradually developed and harmonised to regulate issues that can no longer be dealt with by national laws alone, as in the case of the European Union. The contributors discuss the impact of such developments on the construction, evolution and hybridisation of legal texts, analysed both linguistically and from the practitioner's standpoint.

Contents: Davide Simone Giannoni/Celina Frade: Introduction - Estrella Montolío Durán: Discourse, Grammar and Professional Discourse Analysis: The Function of Conditional Structures in Legal Writing - Susan Kermas: English Legal Discourse and the French Continuum - Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski: Responsibility and Welfare: Keywords and Semantic Categories in Legal Academic Journals - Vanda Polese/Stefania D'Avanzo: Linguistic and Legal Vagueness in EU Directives Harmonising Protection for Refugees and Displaced Persons - Ross Charnock: Traces of Orality in Common Law Judgments - Judith Turnbull: Harmonisation of the Law and Legal Cultures in the EU: A Linguistic Approach - Patrick Leroyer/Kirsten Wølch Rasmussen: Accessing Discursive Data Types in Legal Translation Dictionaries: The Case of Sans Préjudice de - Ángel M. Felices Lago: Axiological Analysis of Entries in a Spanish Law Dictionary and their English Equivalents - Christopher Goddard: Legal Linguists: As (In)substantial as Ghosts and True Love? - Iulia Daniela Negru: Acceptability versus Accuracy in Courtroom Interpreting - Francisco Vigier: Legal Translation and Interpreting in the UK Today - Rocco C. Loiacono: The Translation of Bilateral Agreements between Australia and Italy: Linguistic or Functional? - Cornelis J.W. Baaij: Translation in EU Legislative Procedure: A Receiver-Oriented Approach.

The Editors: Davide S. Giannoni, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Bergamo, in Northern Italy, whose Centre for LSP Research (CERLIS) he helped establish in 1999. His research on academic and professional genres has appeared in several international journals and volumes and he is completing a monograph entitled Mapping Academic Values in the Disciplines: A Corpus-Based Approach for Peter Lang. He has also co-edited Identity Traits in English Academic Discourse (2008) and New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis (2006). Celina Frade, Ph.D., is Professor of English for Specific Purposes at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has conducted extensive research on legal English and more recently on the discourse of international arbitration and its implications for Brazilian legal practice. She is currently writing an introduction to legal English and a book on reading/drafting strategies in international contracts. Her work has been published in several volumes, including the Linguistic Insights series.