Law and Language: Overview

This article presents a survey of the research on legal language. Apart from early isolated comments on the style of legal documents, it was a structuralist approach in the late 1960s that served as an impetus for further research. First, the language of legal documents - primarily, their syntax and vocabulary - were examined, and then, with the advent of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, spoken legal language came under the purview of linguists interested in this register. Researchers have also been dealing with, among other things, plain legal language and with the historical development of legal language.