Linguistics Commons^™

The Power Of Words: A Comment On Hamann And Vogel’S Evidence-Based Jurisprudence Meets Legal Linguistics—Unlikely Blends Made In Germany, Mark C. Suchman

BYU Law Review

By offering an international and interdisciplinary point of comparison, Hamann and Vogel demonstrate that current American forays into corpus-based legal scholarship reflect only a small sliver of the full range of possibilities for such research. This Comment considers several key branching points that may lie ahead, as the nascent literature begins to mature. In particular, the Comment examines two vexing ambiguities in the corpus-linguistic agenda: the first centers on the ambiguous meaning of legal “empiricism”; the second, on the ambiguous relationship between words and actions. To achieve its full potential, legal corpus linguistics will need to move beyond mere description, …

How To Enhance Interdisciplinary Competence—Interdisciplinary Problem-Based Learning Versus Interdisciplinary Project-Based Learning, Mirjam Brassler, Jan Dettmers

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

Interdisciplinary competence is important in academia for both employability and sustainable development. However, to date, there are no specific interdisciplinary education models and, naturally, no empirical studies to assess them. Since problem-based learning (PBL) and project-based learning (PjBL) are learning approaches that emphasize students’ collaboration, both pedagogies seem suitable to enhance students’ interdisciplinary competence. Based on the principle of constructive alignment and four instructional principles on interdisciplinary learning, this paper proposes that students profit more from interdisciplinary PBL (iPBL) than interdisciplinary PjBL (iPjBL). A pre-post study was conducted with a sample of 95 students participating in iPBL and 183 students …

Details In Testimony: How Hedge Words Influence People’S Perceptions Of Victim Testimony Credibility, Justine B. Rayborn

Student Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine whether hedge words and the age of a memory can influence the way participants (mock jurors) perceive an alleged sexual assault victim’s credibility. Prior research has demonstrated many issues that can affect the accuracy of memory for childhood events such as childhood amnesia, fragmented and distorted memories, false memories and source monitoring errors and the way in which jurors’ decisions can be swayed based on verbal cues to confidence. Here, we further investigated whether jurors' decisions are sensitive to the age of the memory—an event that happened in the recent or distant …

"Y'All And All These Assessments Is A Little Bit Too Much" : The Effects Of High-Stakes Testing On Critical Literacy Pedagogy., Diana Lalata

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

As the United States of America becomes increasingly diverse, there is a need for teachers to embrace multiculturalism within the classroom. Shifting away from the traditional “banking model” of teaching, educational researchers call for a more critical approach—one in which teachers and students challenge dominant beliefs and practices of education. Foregrounded in those aims of cultural competence and critical consciousness, “critical literacy pedagogy” addresses the politicization of literacy education and employs conscious curriculum and teaching strategies to empower marginalized voices. Although a number of case studies on critical literacy pedagogy show considerable promise in disrupting dominant discourse and developing cultural …

#Ordinarymeaning: Using Twitter As A Corpus In Statutory Analysis, Lauren Simpson

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Forensic Linguistics: Applying The Science Of Linguistics To Issues Of The Law, Robert A. Leonard, Juliane E. R. Ford, Tanya Karoli Christensen

Hofstra Law Review

No abstract provided.

Contesting Victimhood: A Linguistic And Legal Anthropological Analysis Of Defendant Experiences In New York’S Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, Mark T. Romig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs) have been operating in New York City in an effort to connect victims of human trafficking to treatment programs. Unfortunately, the net that the courts cast was too wide and people who did not identify as victims of human trafficking were coerced into treatment programs that they did not need or want. Through textual discourse analysis and ethnographic observation, this paper explores the contestation of victimhood in HTICs by focusing on the experiences of defendants and how they are perceived by the police, judges, and other agents of the HTICs. Before entering the HTICs, defendants …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

Talking Back, With Reawakened Voices: Analyzing The Potential For Indigenous California Languages Coursework At California Polytechnic State University, Logan Cooper

Ethnic Studies

The legacy of colonialism in the United States, including genocidal practices and cultural assimilation, has left Indigenous languages endangered. Native peoples, scholars, and activists have been working to revive and heal the languages of America’s first peoples, and the cultures those languages speak to, yet more work remains in the field of language revitalization. California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo currently does not offer any course specifically teaching or discussing Indigenous languages, even those of the Chumash people who know the San Luis Obispo area as their ancestral homelands.

By synthesizing revitalization and Indigenous activist literature with the narratives …

Is Self-Sufficiency Really Sufficient? A Critical Analysis Of Federal Refugee Resettlement Policy And Local Attendant English Language Training In Portland, Oregon, Domminick Mcparland

Dissertations and Theses

Since the 1951 United Nations Convention, nations have dealt with refugee issues in various ways. In the United States, since the Vietnam War, there has been great debate and a significant amount of research on issues of refugee resettlement, with these discourses inherently involving issues of power and ideology. English language training and the promotion of economic self-sufficiency have been interventions used to integrate and assimilate refugees into American culture and society. These two interventions were the subject of the current investigation.

The purpose of this study was to look into the way federal refugee resettlement policy mandated by the …

Hawking Hyphens In Compound Modifiers, Joan Ames Magat

Faculty Scholarship

The first principle of legal writing is surely its clarity — visible actors (unless the action matters more), uncluttered syntax, and, of course, logical structure. But the little things can matter to clarity, too — such as deliberate punctuation that signifies. In the language of law, in which compound nouns are rife, the reader can feel adrift as to where modifiers end and the noun begins. (Consider government-subsidized health flexible-spending arrangement without those hyphens.) Hyphens help. Whether an author cares to hyphenate the noun is his call; but hyphenating compound modifiers (also called phrasal adjectives, though they may include adverbs …

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer

Faculty Articles

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …

What Could Be Gained In Translation: Legal Language And Lawyer-Linguists In A Globalized World, Samantha Hargitt

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Translation and interpretation have long played a vital role in many legal contexts, from providing equal rights to defendants to facilitating mutual understanding among the members of the United Nations. Legal language, though, is incredibly complex and even faithfully equivalent translations can fail to meet the high standards required for operation in international legal contexts, where a lack of understanding over a single term could mean the difference between a material and non-material breach in a treaty or transnational contract. Branches of linguistics, such as comparative legal linguistics and forensic linguistics, study the characteristics and functions of legal language across …

The Hegemony Of English In South African Education, Kelsey E. Figone

Scripps Senior Theses

The South African Constitution recognizes 11 official languages and protects an individual’s right to use their mother-tongue freely. Despite this recognition, the majority of South African schools use English as the language of learning and teaching (LOLT). Learning in English is a struggle for many students who speak indigenous African languages, rather than English, as a mother-tongue, and the educational system is failing its students. This perpetuates inequality between different South African communities in a way that has roots in the divisions of South Africa’s past. An examination of the power of language and South Africa’s experience with colonialism and …

Sociolinguistics Barriers: Constructing And Reproducing Temporary Migrants' Social Inequalities, Maria Eugenia De Luna Villalón

Western Migration Conference Series

This study explores the sociolinguistic barriers that Mexican Agricultural Temporary Workers (MATW) experience during their temporary stays in Canada. Following an ethnographic approach, some of the findings were that the sociolinguistic barriers lead to sociolinguistic dependency, increasing and perpetuating human and social inequalities of the MATW.

Genre Analysis Of Introductions In Tort Textbooks., Tai Chooi Li

Student Works (2010-2019)

This study examines the introductions in Tort textbooks to determine the structure and patternings used by writers of this genre. A model for the introduction is then proposed. Five introductions are selected and analysed using Bhatia's(1993) framework to identify the moves in Introductions. Through the stratification process of MOVES and STEPS, findings reveal that similar moves are found across the introductions that were analysed due to the common communicative purposes of the writers. The seven areas of importance in Tort introductions found are the introduction and aim of Tort, distinguishing Tort with other areas of law, the role of policy …

The Language Of Consent In Police Encounters, Janice Nadler, J.D. Trout

Faculty Working Papers

In this chapter, we examine the nature of conversations in citizen-police encounters in which police seek to conduct a search based on the citizen's consent. We argue that when police officers ask a person if they can search, citizens often feel enormous pressure to say yes. But judges routinely ignore these pressures, choosing instead to spotlight the politeness and restraint of the officers' language and demeanor. Courts often analyze the language of police encounters as if the conversation has an obvious, context-free meaning. The pragmatic features of language influence behavior, but courts routinely ignore or deny this fact. Instead, current …

Straight From The Mouth Of The Volcano: The Lowdown On Law, Language, And Latin@S, Ȧngel R. Oquendo

Indiana Law Journal

Symposium: Latinos and Latinas at the Epicenter of Contemporary Legal Discourses. Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, March 2007.

A Constitutional Conundrum Of Second Amendment Commas, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Publications

Prompted by the court’s decision in Parker v. District of Columbia, this series of correspondence discusses the effect possible forms of punctuation may have on the Second Amendment. The article makes comments on the important grammars during the founding and also two possible writings of the Second Amendment that contain different sets of punctuation.

A Constitutional Conundrum Of Second Amendment Commas: A Short Epistolary Report, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

Prompted by the court’s decision in Parker v. District of Columbia, this series of correspondence discusses the effect possible forms of punctuation may have on the Second Amendment. The article makes comments on the important grammars during the founding and also two possible writings of the Second Amendment that contain different sets of punctuation.

A Short Note On The Placement Of Adverbs, Jonathan R. Siegel

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The New Black's, Peter Tiersma

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Not Thinking Like A Nonlawyer: Implications Of "Recogonization" For Legal Education, Robert J. Morris

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

A Word-And-Flesh Profession: A Response To White And Brueggemann, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

Speech remakes the world through a relationship among words, speaker, and hearer. On one hand, this view of the human encounter as essentially rhetorical precludes an understanding of speech as purely subjectivist or emotivist self-expression. On the other hand, this same view of human speech interaction precludes the understanding of speech acts as mere descriptions of previously discovered or reasoned truth, either empirical or abstract. Professor White reaffirms this triad among words, speaker, and hearer with what he has identified as the “deeply reciprocal” dynamic of language. Professor Brueggemann also describes the speech acts between Moses, Abraham, and their God …

Desperately Seeking Science, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

In this commentary I offer a lawyer’s view of what law and linguistics interdisciplinary studies might mean for legal practice, as well as a legal theorist’s view of what importance they may hold for jurisprudence. I do not pretend to have more than cursory knowledge about linguistics, and so my remarks about what linguistics scholars might gain from an interdisciplinary exchange necessarily will be brief general.

Contributors: Vol 17 No. 2, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Contributors list of Vol. 17 (1994): Pacific Studies Full Issue 2

Vol. 17 No. 2 (1994): Pacific Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

Vol. 17 No. 2 (1994): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

Books Received And Book Notices, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Book Listing for the Vol 17, No 2 Edition of the Pacific Studies Journal