COHESIVE DEVICES IN LEGAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article deals with cohesive devices applied in a written legal discourse that represents a varied linguistic diversity that has certain characteristic features. It is focused ontextual analysis of cohesion and language use in legal documents. A theoretical explanation of the integrity of the legal text has been offered, as well as examples from literature and the corps of legal documents of the European Union havebeen analyzed. The main objective of this article isto explicate cohesive devices as pragmatic categoriesby introducing and grounding the theoretical frameworkfor the concept of coherence and cohesion, and furthermore to investigate their use by means of selected examples of cohesive devices from the corpus which comprises legal documentsof the European Union. The study has also proved the need to simplify some of those
devices to write comprehensible texts as well as has underlined the differences between the language of Common Law and thelanguage of the European Union Law, since law is considered to be one of the most important aspects of social and political development of society.