Abstract Law language is a cover-term for different genres of legal texts. The genre of law is characterized as being written, legislative and formal. Quantitative studies on the textual and linguistic structure of Old English (oe) law-codes are lacking so far, but both aspects are analysed in this paper on the basis of a corpus of about 20,000 words. The results of the quantitative-qualitative analysis are compared to oe wills on the one hand, and to Early Modern English (emode) and Present-Day English (pde) statutes on the other. The synchronic comparison of oe law-codes and oe wills reveals that the text structure and the linguistic profile of the genres are very similar. The conclusion to be drawn from this result is that genre properties largely determine the textual and linguistic profile of texts in a given period. The diachronic comparisons show marked differences in the linguistic profile of oe law-codes and statutes of later periods.

中文翻译：

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古英语法典

摘要 法律语言是对不同文体法律文本的统称。法律类型的特点是书面的、立法的和正式的。古英语（oe）法典的语篇结构和语言结构目前尚缺乏定量研究，本文以2万字左右的语料为基础对这两方面进行了分析。定量-定性分析的结果一方面与 oe 遗嘱进行比较，另一方面与早期现代英语 (emode) 和现代英语 (pde) 法规进行比较。oe law-codes 和 oe wills 的共时比较表明，这些体裁的文本结构和语言特征非常相似。从这个结果得出的结论是，体裁属性在很大程度上决定了给定时期文本的文本和语言特征。