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Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Joanna Kopaczyk and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 82] 2018
► pp. 131–158

Chapter 6
Between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to textual recurrence

Exploring semantic sequences in judicial discourse

| University of Łódź

The article investigates the link between lexical and meaning patterns in the specialized discourse of judicial opinions. It presents an analysis of the N that pattern in a corpus of US Supreme Court opinions. The analysis looks at the distribution of a selection of nouns found in the pattern across different discourse functions. It is shown that judicial opinions use a range of status-indicating nouns in the N that pattern to perform five main functions: evaluation, cause, result, confirmation and existence. Yet, evaluation plays a central role in judicial writing and most status-indicating nouns are used to signal sites of contentions, i.e. challenged propositions are likely to be labelled as arguments, assumptions, notions or suggestions. By drawing on the concept of semantic sequence (Hunston 2008), the analysis illustrates how corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches can complement one another to build a picture of common epistemological practices in the corpus of legal texts.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, judicial discourse, phraseology, semantic sequence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.N that pattern, evaluation and status
  • 3.Corpus and context
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Discussion of findings
    • 5.1The phrase argument that and its functions
    • 5.2Status-indicating nouns and their discourse functions
  • 6.Conclusion and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.82.06goz
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Cited by 3 other publications

Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław
2019. Chapter 6. “It is not just a fact that the law requires this, but it is a reasonable fact”. In Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 91], ► pp. 123 ff. DOI logo
2019. Marriage, Liberty and Constitution: a Corpusassisted Study of Value-Laden Words in Legal Argumentation . Research in Language 17:1 ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
Zumrík, Miroslav
2021. Lexical Bundles in the Corpus of Slovak Judicial Decisions. Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis 72:2 ► pp. 705 ff. DOI logo

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