摘要：The article reports results from a larger contrastive study of legislative documents across two different legal systems – the codified Roman-law based legal system in Bulgaria and the common law and precedent based system in England. The hypothesis is that the differences are reflected in the language used to conceptualise statutory provisions. The main aspects of the textual component of statutory texts, namely the structure and place of legal qualifications and their relatedness to preceding or following discourse are examined. The study is based on the assumption that the thematic and informational structure of discourse and patterns of cohesion are adequate tertium comparationis in analysing different genres.
The first part of the study (Yankova, forthcoming) analyses the various ways legal provisions are textualised, their syntactic position and thematic organisation in Bulgarian and English statutory texts (200 pages in each language) from the area of criminal law and proceedings. In the second stage of the contrastive study presented here, non-structural text-forming relations which effectuate the semantic textual relations of the text are investigated. The analysis is based on the premise that the way meaning is superficially encoded by cohesive links which contribute to the texture of a stretch of discourse is specific for each genre and varies across languages.
