The importance of being patterned. Old and new perspectives on legal phraseology

The aim of the chapter is to provide an overview of the main research perspectives that can be adopted to analyze the multifaceted area of legal phraseology. This field is receiving greater attention within legal discourse studies also thanks to the key contribution of corpus linguistics, which has both demonstrated the centrality of phraseological patterns in legal language and provided researchers with powerful analytical tools. After defining and classifying legal phraseology from different yet complementary standpoints, the chapter exemplifies old and new research perspectives and reviews a selection of methods adopted to study this distinctive trait, as well as some applications. It aims at showing the advantages and disadvantages of using patterning in the discursive construction of legal texts.