Globalizing Trends in Legal Discourse

Abstract

In recent years, the dismantling of cultural, disciplinary and national barriers, especially in the context of cooperation and collaboration in international trade, has accelerated moves towards the globalization of sociocultural, business and communication issues. This process of globalization offers a topical illustration of the interaction between linguistic and cultural factors in the construction of discourse, both within specialized domains and in wider contexts. In spite of the fact that specialized discourse has traditionally been considered objective and impersonal, in recent years linguistic research has shown both the existence of overt and covert strategies that modulate the author’s control of the recipient’s response, and the presence of discoursal realizations aiming at presenting facts and concepts from a non-neutral perspective. This is a confirmation of the fact that language is generally marked both in its cultural content and in the range of available linguistic variants (cf. Kuper 1999), and that people involved in cross-cultural communication clearly construct discourse to suit the communicative needs of an international audience, adapting their native identities to a common plan which implies a new framework of values and shared behaviours.