Patterns Of Linguistic Variation In American Legal English

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 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.

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.

The use of corpora has conventionally been envisioned as being either corpus-based or corpus-driven. While the formal definition of the latter term has been widely accepted since it was established by Tognini-Bonelli (2001), it is often applied to studies that do not, in fact, fullfil the fundamental requirement of a theory-neutral starting point. This volume proposes the term pattern-driven as a more precise alternative. The chapters illustrate a variety of methods that fall under this broad methodology, such as the extraction of lexical bundles, POS-grams and semantic frames, and demonstrate how these approaches can uncover new understandings of both synchronic and diachronic linguistic phenomena.

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.

Multi-Dimensional Analysis: Research Methods and Current Issues provides a comprehensive guide both to the statistical methods in Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) and its key elements, such as corpus building, tagging, and tools. The major goal is to explain the steps involved in the method so that readers may better understand this complex research framework and conduct MD research on their own. Multi-Dimensional Analysis is a method that allows the researcher to describe different registers (textual varieties defined by their social use) such as academic settings, regional discourse, social media, movies, and pop songs. Through multivariate statistical techniques, MDA identifies complementary correlation groupings of dozens of variables, including variables which belong both to the grammatical and semantic domains. Such groupings are then associated with situational variables of texts like information density, orality, and narrativity to determine linguistic constructs known as dimensions of variation, which provide a scale for the comparison of a large number of texts and registers. This book is a comprehensive research guide to MDA.

As the first collective volume to focus exclusively on corpus-based approaches to register variation, this book provides an exhaustive account of the range and depth of possibilities that the domain of register variation in English has to offer. It illustrates register variation analysis in different theoretical frameworks, such as Probabilistic Grammar, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Information Theory, and proposes a new framework within the Text Linguistic Approach: the continuous-situational analytical framework. Several of the contributions apply Multi-Dimensional Analysis to corpus data in order to unveil register (dis)similarities, while others rely on logistic regression models and periodization techniques based on Kullback-Leibler divergence. The volume includes both inter-register and intra-register variation analysis of a wide spectrum of varieties, speakers and periods: British and American English, learner varieties, L2 varieties, and also contains diachronic studies covering early and late Modern English. This broad scope should be a source of inspiration for anyone interested in historical and ongoing register variation in a vast range of varieties of English worldwide.

This book describes interdisciplinary exploration of matters related to the translation and interpreting of legal texts. Translation of legal texts has grown exponentially since the beginning of new millennium in response to the fast-increasing volume of international trade and business as well as all sorts of other transnational activities in a myriad of spheres. International trade demands translation of trade laws and business contracts, immigration leads to rise in court interpreting services, and countries may seek to enhance their international influence through translating and making known to the world their laws and/or other legal documents. These legal translation activities occurred mostly between languages officially used in international or regional organizations, such as the United Nations and the European Union, and between the languages of major countries who exert or seek influence on international economy and law. On the other hand, rapid advances in computer technology and artificial intelligence in recent years have also brought about changes in the practices of legal translation. With changes also come problems in both theory and practice that merit our immediate attention. This edited volume highlights the newest developments in the theory, practice, and training of legal translation, with contributions from international leading researchers in this area. It will be a standard reference for anyone who is to embark on research and practice of legal translation in the twenty-first century. It is also adaptable as teaching materials for translation and interpreting training.