The power of attorney. A creatively conventional genre in legal discourse?

Abstract

The power of attorney is one of the most frequently used instruments in international legal practice, both in Common Law and Civil Law contexts. Internationally known as a legal-lay contractual agreement, it is locally adapted and drafted to suit specific, local realities. Generally, contracts lie within those genres which combine ‘highly formal traits with features typical of the written mode’ (Gotti 2005, p. 21). Additionally, as contracts, powers of attorney can be considered as highly codified and standardised, with easily predictable sentences and constructions, rich in formulaic expressions (Gotti 2005, p. 21), thus showing a crystallized and conventional use of certain routines. Starting from the assumption that legal language is inherently complex, obscure and over sophisticated (Di Renzo Villata 2007, p. 4), the present study investigates the power of attorney as a legal genre, identifying its particular move structure (Bhatia 2003). The qualitative and quantitative analysis of a corpus of different typologies of powers of attorney, drafted ad hoc for specific actions, endeavours to ascertain whether and to what extent specific generic features, macrostructures, moves, along with lexical expressions, archaic formulas and clichés can be placed on a creativity-conventionality cline. The investigation aims to determine whether powers of attorney can be representative of the dynamic interaction between conservatism and lexical productivity.