Grammar in Legal Discourse

A frequent feature of jurists‘ comment on the language of legal texts is concerned, not only generally with notions of „correctness“, but with a number of grammatical features, such as “and/or” ,”shall/will” or punctuation. Espousing a functional approach to syntax, this project looks at how the functions of certain grammatical structures, such as adverbials, articles and the realization of cognitive status, as well as punctuation, are different from non-legal usages and tries to relate the properties of these uses to functions and properties of the legal genres in which they are embedded.