Conveying deontic values in English and Italian contracts: a cross-cultural analysis

Legal language has been the centre of increasing scholarly interest over the last two decades, and the importance of this field is constantly growing in LSP studies. The present study investigates the deontic values conveyed by legal texts, and in particular by contracts, from a cross-cultural perspective (English and Italian). While valuable analyses have already been carried out on the topic in English legal texts, mainly statutes (Gotti & Dossena eds. 2001), cross-cultural analyses of the issue are still relatively rare in contracts, and often limited to general pragmatic features (Frade 2005). Our interest combines a focus on contrastive rhetoric (Connor 2002, 2004; Mauranen 2001), with an interest in linguistic resources in English and Italian. From this perspective, a comparative dimension of the analysis seems important, one which would allow for the study of linguistic variation across cultures. From a methodological point of view, the study adopts a position which shows the need to integrate corpus and discourse perspectives in the analysis of textual data. This allows for an integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, of text and corpus work, as well as of co-text and context analysis.