Syntactic and Lexico-Semantic Aspects of the Legal Register in Ramesside Royal Decrees (Gottinger Orientforschungen, IV. Reihe Agypten, 38)

Analysis of the legal register of a corpus of some fifty Ramesside royal decrees dating from 1300 to 1100 B.C. in the wider context of forensic discourse analysis of the legislative genre, in an attempt to establish constants in forensic linguistics that span time and space. The general character and formulation of these normative documents reveal a remarkable homogeneity and represent a specific linguistic register that has a common textemic, pragmatic, and narratologic structure, as well as a coherent syntactic and lexico-semantic usage, as modern legal dialects do today. Furthermore, the research tries to enrich the understanding of Egyptian legal terminology and legal categories by a systematic semantic analysis of the classifiers used in the legal lexicon (classifiers in the hieroglyphic system represent iconic elements that have no phonetic value, but assign words to semantic classes). The extremely interesting Egyptian graphic categorization set of classifiers present in these texts offers some invaluable insights into the Egyptian conceptual organization system.