Corpora and Computation in Teaching Law and Language

  1. Ruth Breeze 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Navarra
    info

    Universidad de Navarra

    Pamplona, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02rxc7m23

Revista:
Language and Law

ISSN: 2194-7414

Año de publicación: 2017

Volumen: 6

Páginas: 1-17

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.14762/JLL.2017.001 GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Otras publicaciones en: Language and Law

Resumen

Corpus use has revolutionised the teaching of languages for specific purposes. In this article, I review some of the ways in which corpus studies can enhance our understanding of the regularities in legal language, looking particularly at formulaic language in four different areas of legal language: academic law articles, case law (judgments and opinions), documents (contracts, merger agreements, etc.) and legislation. After a brief overview of lexical issues in legal language, I look in greater detail at 4- to 8-word bundles in legal texts. After some consideration of legal modality and recurring syntactic structures, I show how these aspects come together with the phenomenon of bundles and formulaicity. I then provide some examples of how the kind of information provided here by specialised corpora can be exploited for teaching purposes.