Changes in the verb phrase in legislative language in English

Williams, Christopher

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139060998.015

Cited by 17 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 2 publications

(2 reference statements)

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“…Admittedly, the landscape of English-language legal drafting, as already suggested, is rather uneven as far as shall is concerned, so that the results that I will be reporting cannot be readily generalized to other English-speaking jurisdictions. Nevertheless, these results -which can be seen as part of a broader study of the use of shall and other verbal forms in prescriptive legal texts, as reported in Williams (2006Williams ( , 2007Williams ( , 2009Williams ( , 2010Williams ( , 2013 -strongly support the observations of other legal language scholars and appear to be robust enough to call out for some explanation in terms of the perception and use of shall inside and outside the legal community.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…In many English-speaking countries, however, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, a decline has been observed over the past few decades in the use of shall in prescriptive legal texts (e.g., Foley 2001;Williams 2005Williams , 2006Asprey 2010). This decline has been associated either with the total elimination of shall and replacement by other verbal constructions, as in Australia and New Zealand, or with its drastically reduced usage, as at both Westminster and Edinburgh in the United Kingdom (Williams 2007(Williams , 2013. However, in other English-speaking countries, particularly the United States and Canada, the situation of shall is more complicated: use of shall, at least in its obligatory sense, has continued, notwithstanding similar efforts in these jurisdictions to eliminate shall (see, e.g., Kimble 2010, Sullivan 2001.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Is legal English “going European”? The case of the simple present

Williams

2013

Can. J. Linguist.

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In many countries in continental Europe the simple present is extensively used in main clauses in legislative texts to express obligation. Several English-speaking legal systems have witnessed an increased usage of the simple present in legal English over the last few decades, largely at the expense of shall. I examine the continuing debate among law scholars and writers of legal drafting manuals over the adoption of the simple present in prescriptive texts in English. I conclude by observing that the decision in some countries to do away with shall would appear to be linked principally to socio-pragmatic factors relating to the way this modal auxiliary is perceived in many parts of the English-speaking world today, that is, as being outdated and smacking of “legalese”, a style of legal writing that plain language exponents have been trying to eliminate.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is legal English “going European”? The case of the simple present

Williams

2013

Can. J. Linguist.

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“…(7) She goes to Carlisle in September (MPT/ª) Another anomaly in the contemporary system, as mentioned earlier is shall, which is often reported to be restricted to formal registers and formulaic utterances in modern English (Williams, 2013). Furthermore, it is rare to non-existent in Ireland and Scotland, (Robertson & Graham, 1952/1991, Crystal, 1986.…”

Section: Circumscribing the Variable Contextmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…This is supported by a Google n-grams search for am be going to/is be going to/are be going to in British and American fiction where there is an upwards swing across both varieties over the period 1840-2000. 5 Contemporary reports suggest that shall, as in (6)a, has mostly receded to formulaic and legal uses (Williams, 2013). Present tense and present progressive constructions are infrequent and highly circumscribed, as in (b-c) (e.g.…”

Section: (4)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammaticalization at an early stage: futurebe going toin conservative British dialects

Tagliamonte¹,

Durham²,

Smith³

2014

English Language and Linguistics

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The Englishgofuture, a quintessential example of grammaticalization, has shown layering withwillsince at least 1490. To date, most synchronic evidence for this development comes from dialects wherebe going torepresents a sizable proportion of the future temporal reference system. However, in the United Kingdom in the late twentieth century there were still dialects wherebe going towas only beginning to make inroads, representing a mere 10–15 per cent of future contexts. These varieties offer an effective view of the early stages of grammatical change.Statistical analysis of nearly 5,000 variable contexts reveals that the use ofbe going tois increasing across generations, but at different rates, depending on location and orientation to mainstream norms. Major patterns of use mirror previous findings:be going tois favoured for subordinate clauses. However, other widely reported constraints conditioningbe going toare radically different across age groups, exposing contrasts between incipient vs later stages of grammaticalization. In the most conservative dialectsbe going tois strongly correlated with negatives and questions especially in the first person singular. This suggests that these contexts may have been the ‘trigger’ environments for redistribution of meaning of the incoming grammatical form (Hopper & Traugott 1993: 85). The fact that strong effects of negatives and questions endure in contemporary urban varieties (Torres-Cacoullos & Walker 2009) confirms that grammaticalization begins in very specific syntactic contexts, and impacts on the system for generations to come. In contrast, other reported constraints – resistance ofbe going toin the first person singular and extension to inanimates and far future readings – emerge across generations, suggesting they are later developments.Taken together, these findings demonstrate how synchronic dialects show us incremental steps in the grammaticalization process. Comparative sociolinguistic analysis thus offers insights into which patterns define the point of grammaticalization itself; which derive from systemic processes; which can be attributed to discourse routines and collocations; and how these factors converge in shaping the evolution of grammar.

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“…The form will is considered standard while shall, other than in questions with first plural subjects, as in (24a), is reported to be formal and in decline across major varieties of English (e.g. Williams 2013). Linguistic research documents that will and its variants are preferred in 'speech-based' registers (Nesselhauf 2007a:291).…”

Section: N T E N S I F I E R Smentioning

confidence: 99%

So sick or so cool? The language of youth on the internet

Tagliamonte

Y²

2016

Lang. Soc.

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This article presents the results of a two-year study of North American youth which produced a 179,000 word corpus of internet language from the same writers across three registers: email, instant messaging, and phone texting. Analysis of three linguistic phenomena—(i) acronyms, short forms, and initialisms; (ii) intensifiers; and (iii) future temporal reference—reveals that despite variation in form and contrasting frequencies across registers, the patterns of variant use are stable. This offers linguistic evidence that there is no degeneration of grammar in internet language use. Instead, the young people are fluidly navigating a complex set of new written registers, and they command them all. (Internet, language change, youth)*

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Changes in the verb phrase in legislative language in English

Cited by 17 publications

References 2 publications

Is legal English “going European”? The case of the simple present

Is legal English “going European”? The case of the simple present

Grammaticalization at an early stage: futurebe going toin conservative British dialects

So sick or so cool? The language of youth on the internet

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