13. Abundant use of the passive voice

Passive voice is inherent in legal language, but it is also overused in all types of legal

documents. Legal drafters instinctively stick to it, so both laws and court decisions generally contain a verb in the passive, especially when obligation or condition is imposed. They tend to create the impression that such rules are infallible as they occur without the influence of the human agent. The legal drafters are encouraged to modify the texts by transforming passive voice into active, because the passive is justified only when the doer of the action is unknown or intentionally left out. The same goes for law. Sometimes it is not possible to use the active voice because there is no specific agent in a sentence, thus the passive is the only choice.

14. Prepositional phrases: heavy occurrence of prepositional phrases in legal English as in “to give time for the payment of any purchase “(Van Dijk 1981: 282).

15. Conditionals and hypothetical formulations

In texts like statutes, contracts and handbooks containing procedural rules, many

possible situations, factual scenarios and exceptions must be provided for. The result is that the language in which they are written, and legal language generally, is unusually rich in syntactic indicators of condition and hypothesis, which may be positive ('if', 'when', 'where', 'whenever', 'wherever', 'provided that', 'in the event that/of', 'assuring that', 'so long as', 'should' and many others) or negative ('unless', 'failing', 'should ... not...', 'except as/where/if', 'but for', and so on). Translators should be especially vigilant to ensure that they deal adequately with complex conditions, which may include double or triple hypotheses and mix positive with negative possibilities, as in the following passage:

e.g Where either party fails to perform their side of the bargain, then, subject to clause 15 above, if notice non-performance is given in writing by the injured party within seven days, or, in the event that communication is impossible until the ship reaches a port of call, as soon thereafter as is practically possible, the injured party shall be entitled to treat the contract as discharged except as otherwise provided in this contract.

16) Sentence Length and Complexity

The complexity of legal register sentences can be spotted very easily. Gustafsson (1975) says that an average sentence contains 55 words (twice as many as in scientific English, for example), and there are 2.86 clauses per sentence in the legal style. Legal English consists of only complete sentences containing both coordinate and subordinate clauses, and instances of clausal embedding (inserted clauses) are not unique. Sentences can stretch over several lines, constitute one whole paragraph, and it is not an exception that a whole document can consist of one sentence only. Specific sentence structure is caused by the fact that in the past every part of a legal document used to consist of a single sentence. Sentences included a great deal of information, repetitiveness, long noun phrases with plenty of modification, peculiar word order, prepositional phrases, as well as coordinate and subordinate clauses. As a result, lawyers are advised to measure the sentence length, or cut out superfluous words and sentences, or even delete redundant words and phrases (Rylance 1994: 18). Only words that support the arguments given in the text add value to the sentence.

e.g. “… to sign agreements, conveyances, transfer, declarations, affidavits, petitions, statements and other documents in my name and on my behalf that are necessary to affect a sale of the property…”