Interpersonality in Legal Genres [book]

Ruth Breeze, Maurizio Gotti, Carmen Sancho Guinda
2014
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 hunston, 2005) . however, as the editors point out in the introductory chapter, the interpersonal aspect of language still
more » ... 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. When writers adopt a point of view, a kind of dialogic engagement takes place. Monoglossic formulations involve only the single voice of the writer and ignore the multiplicity of alternative views and voices, as opposed to the heteroglossic point of view, in which the utterance operates in a communicative context with multiple voices and viewpoints (Martin & White, 2005: 575). This dialogistic perspective and the notion of heteroglossic engagement are instantiated in the number of legal genres investigated in this volume. legal experts choose to emphasise their visible presence by manifesting a level of authority in a text, which becomes central to building a convincing discourse. alternatively, writers choose to position themselves close to readers in nonexpert circles, which contributes to their invisibility, thereby showing consideration and deference to the lay reader. rEsEñas / booK rEVIEWs Ibérica 29 (2015): 223-236
doi:10.3726/978-3-0351-0725-8 fatcat:e4sld23sq5a5nflvscruvatll4