Generic instability in a frozen legal genre?

Abstract

Abstract Though legal discourse has undergone several steps of metamorphosis to evolve from a law and language discourse that considers the subject of the law sacred to a language of the law discourse that views “language as social action and law as social discourse” (Goodrich 1987: 76), it is still believed that “legal language has to be the way it is” (Danet 1980: 541). This is relevant especially to those genres at the frozen written end of the legal discourse scale. However, the fact that legal texts “can be relatively precise, or quite general or vague, depending on the strategic objectives of the drafter” (Tiersma 2008: 7) can create blurs within the determinacy of such genres. In this context, the genre of Life Insurance Contracts which belongs to the written mode and frozen style end of the legal language continuum is studied to investigate to what extent we can talk about challenging generic stability in such a genre. The focus is put specifically on the frequency of use of personal pronouns in this genre that claims functional redundancy. The experiential meta-function of Systemic Functional Linguistics is also used to detect the participant roles assigned to these pronouns and to find out if the frequency of certain roles is generic. These frequencies that are computed using the UAM computational CorpusTool in a corpus made up of 16 contracts counting 174.288 words are studied in relation to the purposes of the legal genre of Life Insurance Contracts.