Description of Syntactic and Lexical Properties of Persian Civil Law Texts

This article reports the result of a research in forensic linguistics in Persian. Some syntactic and lexical properties of the Persian civil law were studied with the use of content analysis. The findings of the research revealed that in the syntactic aspect, 34.06 percent of clauses include impersonal, middle and passive constructions; the highest percentage belongs to impersonal ones (14.62 %); sentences are mostly complex (45.79 %) and compound-complex (33.17 %). As for the lexical aspect, the number of technical terms form 25.67 of the total number of words in the corpus, which is the highest percentage of lexical-type whereas cliché words form the lowest percentage of 2.82. Moreover, lexical collocations form 31.98 percent of the corpus. The last finding is that the lack of redundancy in the text of the Persian civil law has resulted in its complexity.