Mattila, Heikki (2006): Comparative Legal Linguistics. Aldershot: Ashgate, 347 p.

Legal linguistics in its various national guises: linguistique juridique, jurilinguistique, Rechtslinguistik, etc. has been the subject of very few monographs. This deficieny was redressed in 1990 with the publication of Gérard Cornu’s Linguistique Juridique in which the author admitted that la linguistique juridique had yet to find its place in the list of established branches of knowledge: “ne figure pas à la nomenclature des branches du savoir” (Cornu 1990: 13). Heikki Mattila’s Comparative Legal Linguistics is a very welcome addition to this tradition in what is a discipline in statu nascendi. It examines the “development, characteristics and usage of” the major legal languages (p. 11) while also drawing on examples from minor languages including Finnish, Swedish, and Danish. The synthesis found in Cornu’s work is also evident here. Not only the legal lexicon but also legal phraseology and style are examined. The author has outlined elsewhere the desiderata of studies in legal linguistics: These requirements are, for the most part, successfully met in the current work. In the general introduction, the discipline is situated within legal science and defined in terms of its relationship with cognate areas such as comparative law, legal semiotics and legal informatics. The rest of the book is divided into three main parts: legal language as a Language for specific purposes (LSP), the major legal languages and a concluding section on lexical comprehension and research needs. In the first part, the author examines the characteristics of legal language as an LSP and illustrates how these are in part determined by the functions law has to perform. These characteristics include formalism, precision, archaism, abstraction, remoteness, noun-sickness (the density of nouns), etc. The originality of legal syntax is also illustrated by means of an example. The operative part of some Danish judgments still includes the following sentence: sagsøgte bør for sagsøgers påstand fri at voere (the defendant is acquitted of the plaintiff’s claim). According to normal word order, the end of this sentence would be bør voere fri (p. 84). One is reminded that all legal languages share specific characteristics. This acknowledgment of the particularity of legal syntax is at variance with the stance of Cornu (1990: 35) who argues that the language of the law has no specific syntax. In his discussion of legislative discourse, he does, however, point to some syntactical peculiarities such as ellision, ellipsis, etc. The dependence of legal French on the syntactic rules of ordinary French is also stressed by Sourioux and Lerat (1995: 328). However, one need only peruse any legal judgment of a French court to be convinced of the originality of legal syntax: the use of the preposition en where one expects dans or à in phrases like en la Cour, en la forme, en ses réquisitions or the use of près (without de) instead of auprès de in phrases such as près le Tribunal, près la Cour d’appel make for a readily identifiable legal syntax (Raymondis and Le Guern 1976: 17-27). Peculiarities of syntax also abound in English legal discourse (Charrow and Charrow 1979: 1306). Klinck (1992: 254) points out that syntactic choices are relevant to the way legal discourse characteristically creates meaning. The distinctiveness of legal syntax, then, while perhaps not complete is surely more than a question of variety in the “frequency and distribution of the use of specific aspects of grammar” or “some minor differences in grammatical construction” (Gibbons 2003: 55). The major legal languages, Latin, French, German, and English, form the basis of the second part of the book. Examples from legal Italian, legal Spanish …