What is it about?
This article shows that even frozen legal genres that abide by generic rules and restrictions tend to show instability that becomes in itself a characteristic of that genre. The genre studied here is that of life insurance contracts and the linguistic features are the choices of personal pronouns and of participant roles assigned to them (following the transitivity system of Systemic Functional Linguistics).
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Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This article is another manifestation of the dialogic relationship between the text and the system. Indeed, it shows how the genre affects the text by its restricted features and how the text itself affects the genre and changes some of these restrictions.
Perspectives
I think this article might be of help to researchers or students who study legal genres as it studies its features using a large corpus. It could also be handy to insurance buyers to know what's best for them in the market and to dissect the frozen language of contracts.
Ameni Hlioui
Higher Institute of Languages of Gabes, Tunisia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Generic instability in a frozen legal genre?, International Journal of Legal Discourse, May 2020, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/ijld-2020-2028.
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