Introduction / Girolamo Tessuto -- Part I. Multi-voiced/dialogic and conceptual analyses of legal discourse. 1. Polyphony and dialogism in legal discourse: focus on syntactic negation / Giuliana Garzone -- 2. Conceptualising corporate criminal liability: legal linguistics and the combination of descriptive lenses / Jan Engberg -- Part II: Identity, diversity, equality and justice in legal discourse. 3. Freedom from fear and want: communicating language rights / Tarja Salmi-Tolonen -- 4. Legal necessity or competitive advantage: a critical analysis of workplace diversity initiatives in Hong Kong / Aditi Bhatia -- 5. A corpus-based discourse analysis of refugee in EU legal texts / Giuseppe Balirano, Maria Cristina Nisco -- 6. Regulating the law of seeds: a comparative analysis of social representations in legal versus ecological discourses / Marilyn Pasqua -- Part III: Judicial and out-of-court discourse. 7. Multiple negatives in legal language: the case of English, Italian and Spanish / Stefano Ondelli, Gianluca Pontrandolfo -- 8. Argumentative strategies in the judgments of the European Court of Justice: connectors in French and English / Silvia Cavalieri, Chiara Preite -- 9. Delivering justice: do mediators and lawyers speak the same language? / Lesley Allport -- 10. The language of insurance claims adjustments as paralegal communication: accident reports acting as legal depositions / Glen Michael Alessi -- Part IV: Legal discourse in internet-enabled communication. 11. Reputation management and the fraudulent manipulation of consumer review websites / William Bromwich -- 12. Client reviews of lawyer performance in sociolegal networking media: an appraisal analysis / Anna Franca Plastina -- 13. How the law is responding to a changing society: a comparative linguistic analysis of texts on cybercrime / Judith Turnbull.

Over recent decades, legal language and its representation of social action, social actors and social practices have provided systematic insights into the meaning and function of text, discourse or talk realised in academic, professional and institutional sites of communication, and generated a variety of data for analysis, method and theory. Constructing Legal Discourses and Social Practices, the first issue of the Legal Discourse and Communication international series, looks descriptively and interpretatively at the realised forms of legal discourse and how these are framed and organised by social practices within distinctive sites of legal communication. The four main parts of the book provide a broad coverage of key issues and perspectives arising from a variety of genres (spoken, as well as written) employed in institutional, professional and organisational communication of the law, and bring into focus recent research where language and law play out in the real world. This invaluable book is multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival in its design and implementation, and will be an essential reference for those researching and working in the areas of applied linguistics and for postgraduate students.--

Texto en inglés