• "Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?" : english legal discourse past and present / Teresa Fanego & Paula Rodrøguez-Puente
• English and italian land contracts : a cross-linguistic analysis / Giuliana Diani
• Conditionals in spoken courtroom and parliamentary discourse in english, french, and spanish : a contrastive analysis / Cristina Lastres-López
• Part-of-speech patterns in legal genres : text-internal dynamics from a corpus-based perspective / Ruth Breeze
• A comparison of lexical bundles in spoken courtroom language across time, registers, and varieties / Randi Reppen & Meishan Chen
• "It is not just a fact that the law requires this, but it is a reasonable fact" : using the noun that-pattern to explore stance construction in legal writing / Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski
• Are law reports an "agile" or an "uptight" register? : tracking patterns of historical change in the use of colloquial and complexity features / Douglas Biber & Bethany Gray
• Interpersonality in legal written discourse : a diachronic analysis of personal pronouns in law reports, 1535 to present / Paula Rodrøguez-Puente
• The evolution of a legal genre : rhetorical moves in british patent specifications, 1711 to 1860 / Nicholas Groom & Jack Grieve
• The representation of citizens and monarchy in acts of parliament in 1800 to 2000 : identifying social roles through collocations / Anu Lehto
• Drinking and crime : negotiating intoxication in courtroom discourse, 1720 to 1913 / Claudia Claridge.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The essays in this volume examine the relationship of the Jacobean Witchcraft Act to the culture and society of seventeenth-century England. The book explores the potential influence of King James' works and person on the framing of the Act, including the relationship of Shakespeare's "MacBeth" to these events, as well as the impact of the Darrell controversy on the shaping of witchcraft beliefs before the Act. It also asseses the impact of the legislation on society in various parts of the country, as well as examining how drama reflected the ideas found in the legislation. It concludes by looking at the reasons for its repeal in 1736. This work provides new interpretations of the influence and application of the 1604 Witchcraft Act by some of the world's leading scholars of witchcraft. The contributors include: Jonathan Barry, Jo Bath, Roy Booth, Chris Brooks, Owen Davies, Malcolm Gaskill, Marion Gibson, Clive Holmes, P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, John Newton, and Tom Webster.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)