The phenomenon of a steadily increasing number of divorces in many cultures calls for a growing need for couples contemplating marriage to foresee future divergences in their married life and to try to prevent them through premarital agreements. Premarital, prenuptial, or antenuptial agreements (commonly abbreviated to ‘prenups’ or ‘prenupts’) “describe the rights, duties and obligations of prospective spouses during and upon termination of marriage through death or divorce” (Greenstein 1992). They are a type of mediation within the framework of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), aiming at resolving disputes other than through litigation, and taking the form of contracts used by individuals who want to precisely define the disposition of their assets. The present study aims at investigating premarital agreements in an intercultural perspective. Object of the investigation will be a comparison between some linguistic features in two examples of American prenuptial agreements and two Spanish modelos de capitulaciones matrimoniales, chosen for the purpose of this study and selected among a wider corpus which is currently being built up. Prenups can be classified as “operative legal documents, in that they create or modify legal relations” (Tiersma 1999: 139). Moreover, they “tend to have not only very formal and formulaic legal language, but they traditionally adhere to a very rigid structure” (Tiersma 1999: 139). They are prescriptive legal texts whose priority is to set up rules to regulate the matter of property division after divorce or death, “in such a way as to ensure that there is no room for misinterpretation” (Williams 2005: 122). This entails their compliance with specific rules or norms and certain linguistic choices typical of their specific text genre. As Gotti puts it, “there is usually a close link between the type of specialized text and its structure, which in turn implies a number of correlations between the conceptual, rhetorical and linguistic features that characterize the text itself” (2005: 112). After a brief overview of the legal aspects of prenups in the USA and in Spain, we will frame them as the ADR method of mediation and investigate them as texts belonging to the specific genre of contracts. The linguistic analysis will focus on: 1) the textual organization of the agreements, the organization of their several parts and their contribution to the overall pattern; 2) the lexical items referring to participants or human actors in the agreements.
Till Money (and Divorce) Do us Part: Premarital Agreements in the American and Spanish Legal Discourse
DENTI, OLGA;GIORDANO, MICHELA
2010-01-01
Abstract
The phenomenon of a steadily increasing number of divorces in many cultures calls for a growing need for couples contemplating marriage to foresee future divergences in their married life and to try to prevent them through premarital agreements. Premarital, prenuptial, or antenuptial agreements (commonly abbreviated to ‘prenups’ or ‘prenupts’) “describe the rights, duties and obligations of prospective spouses during and upon termination of marriage through death or divorce” (Greenstein 1992). They are a type of mediation within the framework of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), aiming at resolving disputes other than through litigation, and taking the form of contracts used by individuals who want to precisely define the disposition of their assets. The present study aims at investigating premarital agreements in an intercultural perspective. Object of the investigation will be a comparison between some linguistic features in two examples of American prenuptial agreements and two Spanish modelos de capitulaciones matrimoniales, chosen for the purpose of this study and selected among a wider corpus which is currently being built up. Prenups can be classified as “operative legal documents, in that they create or modify legal relations” (Tiersma 1999: 139). Moreover, they “tend to have not only very formal and formulaic legal language, but they traditionally adhere to a very rigid structure” (Tiersma 1999: 139). They are prescriptive legal texts whose priority is to set up rules to regulate the matter of property division after divorce or death, “in such a way as to ensure that there is no room for misinterpretation” (Williams 2005: 122). This entails their compliance with specific rules or norms and certain linguistic choices typical of their specific text genre. As Gotti puts it, “there is usually a close link between the type of specialized text and its structure, which in turn implies a number of correlations between the conceptual, rhetorical and linguistic features that characterize the text itself” (2005: 112). After a brief overview of the legal aspects of prenups in the USA and in Spain, we will frame them as the ADR method of mediation and investigate them as texts belonging to the specific genre of contracts. The linguistic analysis will focus on: 1) the textual organization of the agreements, the organization of their several parts and their contribution to the overall pattern; 2) the lexical items referring to participants or human actors in the agreements.
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