Corpus Based Research On Variation In English Legal Discourse

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.

Translators, law students or legal professionals who begin to deal with legal language face a bewildering variety of legal writings. Even though legal language has been examined from a multitude of perspectives, there are virtually no studies explicitly addressing variation in legal English in terms of recurrent linguistic patterns. This book is a first step towards filling this gap. It provides a corpus-based linguistic description of variation among several selected legal genres, including vocabulary distribution and use (keywords), extended lexical expressions (lexical bundles), and lexico-syntactic co-occurrence patterns (multidimensional analysis). The findings are interpreted in functional terms in an attempt to provide an overall characterization of the most commonly encountered types of legal language.

This Research Handbook offers a comprehensive study of jurilinguistics that not only presents the latest international research findings among academics and practitioners, but also provides a new approach to the phenomena and nature of communicative flexibility, legal genres, vulnerability of interlingual legal communication, and the cultural landscape of legal translation.

Focusing on the multi-faceted topic of Eurolects, this volume brings together knowledge and methodologies from various disciplines, including sociolinguistics, legal linguistics, corpus linguistics, and translation studies. The legislative varieties of eleven EU official and working languages (Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Maltese, Polish, Spanish) are analyzed using corpus methodologies in order to investigate the variational dynamics and translation-induced patterns of the different languages. The underlying assumption is that, within the sociolinguistic continua of the EU languages, it is possible to single out specific legislative varieties (Eurolects) that originate at a supra-national level. This research hypothesis is strongly supported by the empirical findings derived from detailed corpus analyses of each language. This work represents the first systematic and comprehensive linguistic research conducted on a wide range of EU languages using the same protocol and applying corpus methodologies to the extensive Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis highlights the diversity, breadth, and depth of corpus approaches to discourse analysis, compiling new and original research from notable scholars across the globe. Chapters showcase recent developments influenced by the exponential growth in linguistic computing, advances in corpus design and compilation, and the applications of sound quantitative and interpretive techniques in analyzing text and discourse patterns. Key discourse domains covered by 35 empirical chapters include: • Research contexts and methodological considerations; • Naturally occurring spoken, professional, and academic discourse; • Corpus approaches to conversational discourse, media discourse, and professional and academic writing. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis is key reading for both experienced and novice researchers working at the intersection of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as anyone undertaking study in these areas, as well as anyone interested in related fields and adjacent research approaches.

This book is a collection of papers dealing with the study of language varieties from a corpus linguistics perspective. They focus on the analysis of language in different communicative and professional settings, meeting current lines of research, such as teaching and learning, translation, domain-specific grammatical and textual phenomena, linguistic variation and gender.

Legal translation is hallmarked by peculiarities revolving around language intricacies, particular formulae, and system-specificity issues. At present, there is a spectrum of legal corpora dedicated to court-related topics and legislation, but there is no corpus composed of private legal documents such as contracts and agreements. This book wishes to bridge this gap by providing English-Italian comparable corpora related to the domain of (general) terms and conditions of service, together with a model for their use in the translation classroom. It offers a novel contribution to the scientific community as it makes corpora of private legal documents available for consultation. In addition, it shows that legal corpora built by following rigorous methods can become reliable tools in translator training and, most likely, in translation practice. This book is for students in Translation Studies, professional translators, researchers and scholars in legal language and legal translation, as well as legal practitioners and lawyers.

This volume brings together contributions selected from papers delivered at the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Leiden 2021). The chapters deal with aspects of language use throughout the history of English, including efforts to prescribe and regulate language in texts that share specific forms, functions and audiences. They feature both quantitative and qualitative analyses of changing language use, often in relation to trends of language advice in such metalinguistic works as grammars, spelling books and usage guides. The authors showcase work on pragmatics and prescriptivism (understatement between Middle and Late Modern English, capitalization of common nouns from Early to Late Modern English and the use of stigmatized grammatical variants in eighteenth-century plays), specific text types (case studies of political, legal and medical English) and the language of late modern letters (diachronic stylistic changes, letter-copying practices, the role of letter-writing manuals and changing spelling practices). This volume will be of interest to those working on pragmatics, prescriptivism and sociolinguistics of English, historical linguistics, language change, computational historical linguistics and related sub-disciplines.