On conditionals in legalese: A corpus-based study

Abstract

The present article develops a research direction of corpus-based linguistic analysis suggested in previous work (Alexe 2015): researching Romanian conditional constructions from the perspective of language registers. The paper will focus on the expression, in legal language (legalese), of the conditional relation at the level of clausal realization illustrated by conditional clauses introduced by simple conjunctions (dacă, cand, de, sa) and complex conditional connectives (în cazul/ situația/ măsura/ condițiile în care, cu condiția să, etc.). These constructions will be analyzed from the point of view of their formal features such as clause order, mood-tense patterns, the marking of the apodosis by means of connective adjuncts as well as from the point of view of their typology and concurrence between connectives. The results of the present analysis of conditional constructions in legalese will be compared with the conclusions of the above-mentioned work (Alexe 2015), which is a general description of conditional constructions in Romanian. This comparison will provide data regarding the way in which conditional constructions used in legal documents abide by the main features of prototypical conditionality and the typological classification identified for the entire category of conditional constructions in Alexe (2015).