Interpersonality in Legal Genres. Review

Abstract

Interpersonality draws attention to the fact that writers do not simply produce texts but use language to offer a credible representation of themselves and their work, and to establish social relations with readers. research on interpersonality has been mainly carried out on texts in academic, scientific and technical genres (e.g. latour & Woolgar, 1979; hyland, 2004, 2005; hunston, 2005). however, as the editors point out in the introductory chapter, the interpersonal aspect of language still remains under-researched, dispersed and limited to a narrow range of genres and to a restricted notion of interpersonality in legal contexts. The present volume is intended to fill this gap and is therefore a valuable contribution to the study of the interactional dimension of language across specific legal genres. adopting a genre approach, the contributions offer a systematic linguistic analysis of the realisation and distribution of interpersonal features in specific legal texts. Throughout the volume, the contributors convincingly offer a wide range of theoretical frameworks and combined approaches. The contributions investigate various aspects of the interpersonal, dialogic and interactive domain, applying their own taxonomies and extending existing models on dialogic interaction in different legal contexts to various linguistic and discursive features.