Being the primary means of communication worldwide, English has become a career tool for all categories of professionals, including lawyers, as it allows them to communicate internationally. English Legal documents are one of the objects of a lawyer’s routine since they write and interpret English-based contracts and other important documents, which may be complex and also include technical vocabulary. Legal terminology and grammar for non-native speakers of English language may bring difficulties. This article is a cross-linguistic study which describes the typical linguistic features of legal English, focusing on syntactic constructions, and aims to make it more comprehensible not only to those studying it, but to teacher of legal English at the same time. It will mainly deal with the pragmatic aspect of language in a synchronic approach. Such characteristics will be presented using a comparative descriptive perspective, between English and Albanian language. We will mainly focus on grammatical features of instructional language used in English legal documents such as the use of performative verbs and speech acts, performative utterances, verb form, finite verbs, passive forms, subjects and objects etc., comparing them to the Albanian equivalent ones.
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