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Linguistics

Corpus linguistics

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Legal Corpus Linguistics And The Half-Empirical Attitude, Anya Bernstein Nov 2021

Legal Corpus Linguistics And The Half-Empirical Attitude, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deployed.

First, legal corpus linguistics neglects the relevant legal context—the conditions that give legal language authority. Because of this, legal corpus studies’ evidence about language use perversely obscures and misstates …

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Hand Annotation And Reliability: Corpus Linguistic Approaches To Teaching And Studying Writing, Brian Larson Mar 2018

Hand Annotation And Reliability: Corpus Linguistic Approaches To Teaching And Studying Writing, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

If I say “He’s an eligible BLANK,” you’re likely to complete the sentence with “bachelor.” The fact that “eligible” and “bachelor” often appear together--in corpus-linguistic terms, they are collocated--tells us something about the meaning of “bachelor” that is not in its dictionary definition and related social values (e.g., gendered ones, in this example). This workshop, sponsored by the Linguistics, Language, and Writing (LLW) Standing Group, used hands-on activities to introduce theories and methods of corpus-linguistic analysis for various purposes, genres, and sub-fields within writing studies. Facilitators guided attendees through examples of the use of corpus methods in FYC, writing center …

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