![]() ![]() The underlying premise of this paper is that the inclusion of the designation ‘corpus linguistics’ presupposes a central concern with how the linguistic and legal perspectives can be interconnected to shed more light on legal discourse, while keeping a clear focus on the language perspective of the law and language interplay. ![]() Corpus investigation tools are being increasingly used by researchers who would not describe themselves as corpus linguists or even as linguists. Computational approaches to argumentation in law are just one obvious example. In this sense, corpus linguistics research in these sub-areas is a derivative of research into corpus linguistics phraseology and it will be a key focus of attention throughout this paper.įinally, it needs to be pointed out that not all use of computerized data and computer tools should be associated with Corpus Linguistics. The research done in corpus linguistics phraseology has had a profound impact on other (sub)areas, such as formulaicity and standardization in legal documents, legal terminology, variation within legal discourse, legal translation, authorship attribution, to name only few. This is particularly true of legal discourse in its various textual manifestations. Thanks to the commonly accepted usage-based, context-of-use and inductive approaches found in contemporary Corpus Linguistics, we know now that much more language is locked in ‘fixed phrases’ than previously thought. It will prioritize phraseology in its current broad sense, as a complex and multifarious phenomenon central to language description and its organization. Given the sheer volume of current corpus-informed work being done in a wide range of legal languages and cultures, this overview needs to be necessarily restrictive in both depth and scope. This means that linguistic analyses tend to characterize legal discourse, or its certain aspects, by comparing it with other specialized or general discourses or by comparing different types of legal discourse with one another. The methodology of Corpus Linguistics is inherently quantitative (statistical) but frequency of lexical items may become revealing only if a comparative perspective is adopted. It appears that there are certain aspects of legal discourse which are particularly amenable to corpus analysis, such as its inherently formulaic nature, and numerous corpus-based studies have explored this issue, especially in the context of variation. Accordingly, this paper will explore some issues around the use of Corpus Linguistics in analyzing legal discourse, including both its advantages and also some of the methodological challenges associated with its use. While Corpus Linguistics may offer an exciting prospect for both lawyers and linguists of a fruitful relationship with real-life and big data to uncover patterns of language use in law and legal texts which would otherwise go undetected, there are also pitfalls and limitations one should be aware of. These are mainly concerned with legal interpretation, especially regarding the ordinary meaning of terms. Interestingly, recent years have seen an unprecedented growth of corpus-informed research into legal discourse, with its traditional interest in areas such as variation, phraseology, translation, terminology or phraseology, only to be paralleled by explorations carried out by both legal academics and practitioners embracing corpus linguistics methods as a new tool. This is particularly true of the disciplinary discourse of law, where language is central to its construction and interpretation. It soon became very clear that Corpus Linguistics has had much to offer many other areas apart from linguistics, especially those where language and other disciplines are intimately bound up. What started as a methodological enhancement secured by increasing quantities of data, enriched and processed by ever more powerful and efficient computers, has emerged as a theoretical and qualitative revolution which “has offered insights into the language that have shaken the underlying assumptions behind many well-established theoretical positions in the field”. The explosion and expansion of corpora and computer tools in the fields of descriptive and applied linguistics have been made possible mainly because of the information revolution of the late twentieth century. Corpus Linguistics has revolutionized the way language is understood and explored today leading to a proliferation of empirical studies on virtually any aspect of language. ![]()
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