Legacyspeak is an extreme case of what linguists call nominalisation in which actions are turned into objects and verbal processes are turned into abstract nouns. At its simplest this involves the deletion of concrete human agency and its replacement by abstract entities which become the chief protagonists of the storyline. So instead of a transactive model of causality involving a) an actor b) a process of modal action described by a verb, located in a specific time and place, and c) a consequential effect, we have an account dominated by purely impersonal and often literally non verb-alisable processes of agency and accountability. It is a language of action without an intentional human subject.
Read the full text here: Legacy Speak
