Legislative language is a typical sub-genre of legal discourse that is explored for the study of linguistic features of legal discourse. With China’s accession into the WTO, in mainland China, a large amount of English versions of legislation appears, influencing other legal discourse made in English in this jurisdiction and forming an emerging variety of legal English. This study provides a quantitative analysis of syntactic variation in the English legislative texts in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the United States. Using a self-built data set of English legislative corpora based on dependency grammar, the study investigates the distributions of dependency types (de Marneffe & Manning 2016), together with typical linguistic features, and the role that local grammar plays in examining syntactic variation of legislative language. The analysis shows that syntactic variation mainly appears in relation to four dependency types in legislative texts: (1) det (determiner); (2) dep (a dependency labeled as dep when the system is unable to determine a more precise dependency relation between two words); (3) mwe (multi-word expression); and (4) poss (possession modifier). The study also has important applied and pedagogical implications for legal writing, legal translation and ESP.

ESP,legislative text,dependency grammar