Contrastive Discourse analysis of Persian and English legal texts, regarding syntactic, textual and linguistic features and formality of texts

In recent years legal discourse has experienced remarkable as well as multi-dimensional modifications to catch up with highly developing world of courts and law. This study compared and contrasted syntactic, linguistic and textual features of Persian and English court opinions. In the foregoing analysis, the features that are considered typical and distinctive of legal English and Persian have been outlined in different levels. The relevant features of both languages were implemented. Due to the presence of technical terminology, complexity of sentences, levels of explicitness for both languages, the researcher considered only main court opinions and appellate court opinions to be examined and contrasted. To analyze the court opinions, the key syntactic and textual features of legal texts had been precisely defined and association procedure, considering linguistic factors as well has been determined (McCarty, 1977, p.180). In this study, the strategic use of opinion content and appellate opinions were examined to see whether word choices that judges have in their opinions are in consistent with formality of legal texts or not either in English court opinions or in Persian court opinions. Since the focus of this study was on analyzing court opinions and appellate court opinions in Iran as a part to be contrasted, discourse analysis features were applied on Persian language. The sample included 12 opinions and 5 appellate court opinions. In order to provide reliable and valid texts, the opinions were selected from The Handbook of Legal Writing , which is the standard reference book for writing any kinds of legal texts in Persian language. A multi-dimensional analysis of the two languages in court legal texts revealed that English legal texts and Persian legal texts benefit from huge similarities while there are trivial differences due to forensic linguistic specific features of each language. Finally, the results of syntactic analysis of both languages based on the occurrences of some major factors showed that English legal texts and Persian legal texts follow the regular standard outlines of formality, but there are some special differences in amount of usage and occurrence of either language. This highlights the undeniable importance of word choice strategies of judges in courts and appellate courts respectively.

Keywords:

Discourse analysis , Textual features , Main court opinions , Appellate court opinions , English legal texts , Persian legal texts