[1] Interestingly too, he compares the Anglo-American model with what he refers to as the "inquisitorial" legal systems in Europe. The purpose of this article is not, however interesting it may be to do so, to examine the possible differences in "style" between the Anglo-American and the Italian legal system, so this particular issue will have to be left hanging in the air for now.

[2] As Halliday (1987, pp. 70-71) points out, discourse in both written or spoken language is characterised by various kinds of "processing phenomena" manifested in such things as hesitations, revisions, changes of direction etc.. Since written discourse is subject to more reflection and is thus more highly monitored during its production, such features are actually probably more characteristic of written than spoken language. However, since most written language becomes public only in its final, edited form, hestiations, revisions and changes of direction are lost, and the reader is shielded from seeing the process at work. In an oral production mode, such as in a conversation, processing phenomena cannot be edited out - in Halliday's words: "when you speak, you cannot destroy your earlier drafts. If we were to represent written language in a way that is comparable to such representations of spoken language [i.e. vertabim transcripts of the process of speaking], we should be including in the text every preliminary scrap of manuscript or typescript, with all the crossings out, misspellings, redraftings and periods of silent thought; this would tell us what the writer actually wrote." (Halliday 1987, p. 69, supplementary contextual information in square brackets [...] is by the present author). To this I would add that examination of the artefacts of the writing process mentioned above will also provide at least some degree of insight into how the writer actually thought about framing what he or she was writing. A final point, too in this connection, is that in the list of sub-processes in text-production mentioned above, one should probably also include things that are read in order to develop one's arguments, as well as oral discussions around the topic of what is being written about with friends, advisors or colleagues (see Coppock 1996 (a); 1996a 1996b; 1996c; in press (a); in press (b)).