Acknowledgements

The idea for a volume on English legal discourse arose when the two editors were involved in the compilation of the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535–1999 (CHELAR), a database employed as a source of evidence in some of the chapters herein. The positive reception of the corpus by the academic community prompted the organisation of a workshop on corpora of legal English and their research possibilities; it was held in May 2017 at Charles University in Prague, during ICAME 38, and served as the springboard for the studies in the present volume. Additional chapters were contributed by several invited scholars in the field.

We would like to thank the audience at the workshop for their helpful comments during the discussion periods, and the authors for both their chapters and their cooperation during the editing process. We are also greatly indebted to the following colleagues who acted as anonymous external reviewers: Łucja Biel, Silvia Cacchiani, Kathleen L. Doty, Pierfranca Forchini, Christoph Hafner, Paul Jennings, Andreas H. Jucker, Joanna Kopaczyk, Davide Mazzi, Minna Nevala, María Ángeles Orts-Llopis, Carlos Prado-Alonso, Gianluca Pontrandolfo, Maura Ratia, Elena Seoane, Robert Shoemaker, Erik Smitterberg, Maria Svensson, Aleksandar Trklja, Jukka Tyrkkö, Marcia Veirano Pinto, Christopher Williams and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza.

Thanks are also due to Ute Römer, the Series Editor, for her encouragement, wisdom, and continuous support, as well as to Kees Vaes and the editorial staff at John Benjamins for their speedy responses to our many queries. Last but by no means least, we acknowledge the collaboration of our friends and colleagues at the research unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization of the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the generous financial support of the European Regional Development Fund, the Spanish Ministry of Innovation, Science and Universities (grant FFI2017-86884-P), and the Regional Government of Galicia (grants ED431B 2017/12 and ED431D 2017/09).