A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF LAND AGREEMENT

Abstract

An analytical discourse approach to the study of legal document brings within discourse circuit, the age - long statement that “action speaks louder than voice”. Legal document has both linguistic and non linguistic modes of communication ranging from textual uniqueness of the syntactic structures and semiotic features which characterize printed legal document’s content to the meaning –complementary, contextually-dependent pieces of information that make up a discourse meaning . Meaning at discourse level is once again portrayed as an essential product of text-content interaction. This paper therefore offers discourse analysis- a purely language-oriented approach- as a common and an alternative way of decoding meaning from a legal document so that the communicative essence of a legal discourse will not be an exclusive privilege of only “the learned friends” but also of the literate non-professionals