English and Italian land contracts: a cross-linguistic analysis

Legal language has attracted increasing scholarly interest over the last three decades, and the importance of this field is constantly growing. The present chapter examines the textual and linguistic features of a type of legal text, contracts, and in particular land contracts, from a cross-linguistic perspective (English and Italian). Detailed consideration of the form and language of land contracts shows that they exhibit remarkable similarities in the two languages examined, but also differences in the handling of major linguistic strategies such as relativization, nominalization, binomials, or the resources employed to express deontic modality.