Legal Problem Question Answer Genre across Jurisdictions and Cultures

This paper seeks to analyse discourse patterns of legal opinions in two languages and cultures – namely, Legal Problem Question Answers (LPQs) in the UK academic writing context and Pareri (Ps) in the Italian professional writing context. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of discourse in this paper, based on the tenets of genre analysis, was carried out on a small collection of Model Answer texts to Problem Questions used in the two legal cultures. Findings indicate that while LPQs and Ps mostly bear similarities in the relevant rhetorical organisational patterns, they also show differences in the use of lexico-grammatical resources. It is argued that the generic and discoursal patterns resulting from the written data are determined by the writers’ disciplinary (legal) culture and language, which are appropriate to legal discourse practices of Western local jurisdictions.