Grammar of Spanish legal text: why is it difficult to understand the court judgements

Abstract

Texts of court judgements are especially difficult to understand by students of Spanish for specific purposes, not only because of legal terms, but also owing to their syntactic complexity. This study is dedicated to the main syntactic phenomena proper of the text of Spanish court judgements.

Keywords

• legal text
• court judgement
• spanish for specific purposes
• syntactic structure
• subordinate clause
• parenthetical clause
• inversion of word order