Abstract

There are a number of countries that have English as a language of apex court, India is one of them. English, in India, crept into Indian education system as a subject with great effort of Lord Macaulay but dynamically it changed its status. It started its journey as foreign language, then it acquired the status of second language and now it is official language of Supreme Court of India. It would be interesting how far English used in India in legal documents still shares the same linguistic features established by the British.

The present study investigates the syntactic features of Indian Acts. Studies conducted so far on legal English consensually attribute an adjective to legal English: complex. The present study aims to investigate the area where this complexity lie and would also justify the reason for its complexity. It would highlight those syntactical areas which contribute to its complexity. The present paper is divided into three sections, the first deals with definition of major concepts used in the paper such as stylistics, register, genre, and legal English. The second section presents analysis of sentences from Acts. The third and final section discusses the result of findings and gives substantiating conclusion to generalise those findings on Acts. The research will employ triangulation method for analysis and interpretation of data. The genres chosen for the study is Acts therefore, the present study does not generalize the findings of the research on all the genres of law but only on Acts.

Keywords: Stylistics, Register, Legal English, Complexity, Syntactic features