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The article explores court forms as an interactive genre essential for legal-lay communication in civil and family proceedings: court forms elicit key information from predominantly lay users for the purposes of court administration and the judiciary. The information presented in court forms defines the agenda and communicative focus of the subsequent hearings and settlement negotiations, and in some instances even the path the proceedings would take. It is thus important to consider court forms in terms of their comprehensibility as well as functionality for eliciting legally coherent narratives and facilitating efficient engagement of lay participants with the proceedings. The case study presented in the article draws on the combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis... |
