Abstract
Despite the presence of considerable research on intertextuality in several domains, it has been only narrowly examined in the legal register and has been confined to several aspects. A contrastive study was carried out to provide evidence-based generalizations about the different forms of intertextuality, which are, deliberately or inadvertently, omnipresent in legislative and private legal texts collected from Arabic and English-speaking countries. With that being said, this contrastive study aims at expanding further the notion of intertextuality to include recurrent legal terms and salient syntactic features in contractual agreements, to primarily facilitate the process of comprehending and analyzing the templates, the syntactic, and the semantic functions of contractual agreements. The rhetorical organization of several legislative texts, such as UAE Decree, UAE labor law, and an executive order originated from the USA is also closely examined to establish the notion of Intertextuality in the structure of such texts. For this purpose, a quantitative analysis was carried out on a total number of thirty-three texts of six genres: power of attorney, lease agreement, employment agreement, labor law, decree, and executive order originating from ten Arabic-speaking countries and six English speaking ones. The results revealed that contractual agreements share similar templates and rhetorical organization, and the same holds true for legislative texts. A set of legal terminologies were found to be commonly utilized in lease agreements, employment agreements, and Power of attorneydespite their different origins. Finally, there are several syntactic features that their use is rather remarkable in contractual agreements, such as the prominence of modal verbs, present perfect, gerunds, infinitives, and subordination in English texts and the dominance of verbal noun, agent noun, present tense, simple past tense, and coordination in Arabic texts.
