Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Humanities, Psychology and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Prenuptial agreements- A comparative approach
PhD Lecturer Jumanca Romanița Adina Delia
ABSTRACT:
The current paper aims at analyzing a subgenre of English and Romanian legal discourse, namely the prenuptial agreement, antenuptial agreement or premarital agreement, a contract signed and agreed by future spouses prior to their marriage. The purpose of this research is to investigate a corpus of American and Romanian prenuptial agreements or convenții matrimoniale and compare them from a structural, lexical and grammatical point of view. The corpus I have made use of in this paper includes a collection of sample texts and authentic documents, both in English and Romanian, from online archives and notary’s offices databases. Both professionals and ordinary people may come across such types of agreements, as they have become more and more popular in both USA and Romania. They are representative for the various features I intend to analyze in connection with a special legal branch I have chosen to refer to, namely Civil Law/Family Law. I have chosen the genre of agreements/contracts due to several reasons; nowadays, agreements represent a type of document that is very common, and we are all familiar with. Viewed as a legal text growing in popularity, its external and internal properties (Schaffner 2002:3, Biber 1988:70) which include non-linguistic and linguistic features are a challenge when under analysis.
keywords: prenuptials, linguistics, features, legal, law