The aim of this project is twofold: a) To carry out a synchronic analysis of the relevant legal languages and examine their characteristics regarding the following points: ? Lexicon (semantics; lexical field; special meaning vs. everyday vocabulary); ? Syntax (word order); ? Word formation (use and frequency of compounds; productivity of certain suffixes); ? Pragmatics (e.g. ellipsis of grammatical subject and object; non-marked subject shift). At a first stage the legal language of the following three branches are to be analyzed: Greek, Italic, and Anatolian, thus providing a description of the peculiarities of their register. Afterwards, we shall include Indo-Iranian, Old Irish, Old High German, Old English, Baltic, Slavic, Armenian, and Albanian documents. As for Greek, preference will be given to epigraphical texts up to the Hellenistic age; as for Latin, to legal documents up to the end of the Empire; as for Hittite, to the ?Laws? and related documents bearing an evident juridical meaning. b) To carry out a diachronic analysis of the relevant legal languages, thereby reconstructing (if possible) the following points for the parent language: ? Common vocabulary; ? Lexemes; ? Phraseology; ? Lexical field (cf. Watkins? study on theft [Watkins 1986]). Here it will be important to tell apart reciprocal influences (e.g. Greece ? Rome) and common heritage, as formulated in a similar fashion by Wenger (1956: 10) while discussing comparable legal institutions: ?Und doch muss sich jede Rechtsvergleichung, wenn sie Gleichheit oder Ähnlichkeit verschiedener Rechte festzustellen in der Lage ist, über die Gründe solcher Erscheinung Rechenschaft zu geben versuchen. Drei Hauptmöglichkeiten werden da zu erwägen sein: Rezeption, gemeinsame Herkunft, unabhängig gleichartige Rechtsbildung.? The parallelism of the possibilities mentioned here and the main tenets of Historical Linguistics is manifest: borrowing, common heritage or independent innovation, with partly similar results due to a similar initial situation. Over time ? and this will be a concern of this project, too ? the same form may denote different legal contents, whereas the same legal content may be referred to with different forms (the so-called ?Ersatzkontinuanten?).