Keywords
present participle
past participle
How to Cite
Abstract
The paper presents the findings obtained by comparative syntactic analysis of four types
of semi-clause constructions (present participial, gerundial, infinitival and past participial) in two
corpora of British legal English, i.e. Acts of Parliament and appellate judgments. The analysis
focuses on differences in the employment of the respective types of semi-clauses across the two
corpora (both quantitative differences and differences in their syntactic functions) and on their
functional interpretation. The quantitative findings of analysis revealed that the mean number of
semi-clauses per sentence is significantly higher in the corpus of Acts of Parliament as compared to
the corpus of appellate judgments (2,97 and 1,58 respectively), which contributes to a higher level
of sentence condensation of the genre of Acts of Parliament. Comparison of syntactic functions
conveyed by the respective types of semi-clauses across the two corpora confirmed a significant
predominance of semi-clauses with nominal syntactic functions in the corpus of Acts of Parliament.
Corpus findings also suggest that the employment of the analyzed constructions contributes to
stylistic qualities of the legal genres under analysis, such as a higher level of precision and
unambiguity of meaning in the corpus of Acts of Parliament and a less rigid and formal style of
appellate judgments.
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