Open Access

The Corpus of Contemporary English Legal Decisions, 1950–2021 (CoCELD): A new tool for analysing recent changes in English legal discourse


Cite

ARCHER = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers version X. 1990–1993/2002/2007/2010/2013/2016. Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan at Northern Arizona University and University of Southern California; modified and expanded by subsequent members of a consortium of universities. Current member universities are Bamberg, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Helsinki, Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester, Michigan, Northern Arizona, Santiago de Compostela, Southern California, Trier, Uppsala, Zurich. Search in Google Scholar

Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad. 2019. Register, genre, and style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Biber, Douglas and Bethany Gray. 2013. Being specific about historical change: The influence of sub-register. Journal of English Linguistics 41 (2):103–134. Search in Google Scholar

Biber, Douglas and Bethany Gray. 2019. Are law reports an “agile” or an “uptight” register? Tracking patterns of historical change in the use of colloquial and complexity features. In T. Fanego and P. Rodríguez-Puente (eds.). Corpus-based research on variation in English legal discourse, 149–169. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Search in Google Scholar

Biel, Łucja. 2010. Corpus-based studies of legal language for translation purposes: Methodological and practical potential. In C. Heine and J. Engberg (eds.). Reconceptualizing LSP. Online proceedings of the XVII European LSP Symposium 2009, 1–15. Aarhus: Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University. Search in Google Scholar

Bhatia, Vijay K. 1987. Language of the law. Language Teaching 20 (4): 227–234. Search in Google Scholar

Bulatović, Vesna. 2013. Legal language: The passive voice myth. ESP Today. Journal of English for Specific Purposes at Tertiary Level 1 (1): 93–112. Search in Google Scholar

Butt, Peter and Richard Castle. 2006. Modern legal drafting: A guide to using clearer language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Calle-Martín, Javier, David Moreno-Olalla, Laura Esteban-Segura, Miriam Criado-Peña, Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, Teresa Marqués-Aguado, Santiago González-Fernández-Corugedo, Graham D. Caie, Jacob Thaisen, Hanna Rutkowska and Jesús Romero-Barranco. 2016. The Málaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose (MCEMESP). Málaga: University of Málaga. Available from: https://modernmss.uma.es. Search in Google Scholar

Crystal, David. 2019. The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Davies, Mark. 2017. Corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions. Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/scotus/. Search in Google Scholar

Egbert, Jesse, Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray. 2022. Designing and evaluating language corpora: A practical framework for corpus representativeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Fanego, Teresa, Paula Rodríguez-Puente, María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo, Cristina Blanco-García and Iván Tamaredo. 2017. The Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 15351999 (CHELAR): A resource for analysing the development of English legal discourse. ICAME Journal 41: 53–82. Search in Google Scholar

Flowerdew, Lynne. 2004. The argument for using English specialized corpora to understand academic and professional language. In U. Connor and T. A. Upton (eds.). Discourse in the professions. Perspectives from corpus linguistics, 11–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Search in Google Scholar

Garner, Bryan A. 2001. Legal writing in plain English: A text with exercises. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Search in Google Scholar

Garside, Roger. 1987. The CLAWS word-tagging system. In R. Garside, G. Leech and G. Sampson (eds.). The computational analysis of English: A corpus-based approach, 30–41. London: Longman. Search in Google Scholar

Garzone, Giuliana. 2013. Variation in the use of modality in legislative texts: Focus on shall. Journal of Pragmatics 57: 68–81. Search in Google Scholar

Görlach, Manfred. 1999. Nineteenth-century England: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Gotti, Maurizio. 2001. Semantic and pragmatic values of shall and will in Early Modern English Statutes. In M. Gotti and M. Dossena (eds.). Modality in specialized texts, 89–112. Bern: Peter Lang. Search in Google Scholar

Gotti, Maurizio. 2003. Shall and will in contemporary English: A comparison with past uses. In R. Facchinetti, M. Krug and F. R. Palmer (eds.). Modality in contemporary English, 267–300. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Search in Google Scholar

Groom, Nicholas and Jack Grieve. 2019. The evolution of a legal genre: Rhetorical moves in British patent specifications, 1711 to 1860. In T. Fanego and P. Rodríguez-Puente (eds.). Corpus-based research on variation in English legal discourse, 201–234. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Search in Google Scholar

Grover, Claire, Ben Hachey and Ian Hughson. 2004. The HOLJ corpus: Supporting summarisation of legal texts. In S. Hansen-Shirra, S. Oepen and H. Uszkoreit (eds.). Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Linguistically Interpreted Corpora (LINC-04), Geneva, Switzerland [no pagination]. Geneva: University of Geneva. Search in Google Scholar

Johnson, Alison and Malcolm Coulthard. 2010. Introduction: Current debates in forensic linguistics. In M. Coulthard and A. Johnson (eds.). The Routledge handbook of forensic linguistics, 1–15. London: Routledge. Search in Google Scholar

Kearns, Martin. 2007. Legal English. Madrid: Colex. Search in Google Scholar

Leech, Geoffrey. 1991. The state of the art in corpus linguistics. In K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.). English corpus linguistics, 8–28. London: Longman. Search in Google Scholar

Leech, Geoffrey. 2003. Modality on the move: The English modal auxiliaries 1961–1992. In R. Facchinetti, M. Krug and F. R. Palmer (eds.). Modality in contemporary English, 223–240. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Search in Google Scholar

Lehmann, Hans Martin, Caren auf dem Keller and Beni Ruef. 2006. Zen Corpus 1.0. In R. Facchinetti and M. Rissanen (eds.). Corpus-based studies of diachronic English, 135–155. Bern: Peter Lang. Search in Google Scholar

Marín Pérez, María José and Camino Rea Rizzo. 2012. Structure and design of the British Law Report Corpus (BLRC): A legal corpus of judicial decisions from the UK. Journal of English Studies 10: 131–145. Search in Google Scholar

McEnery, Tony, Richard Xiao and Yukio Tono. 2006. Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. London: Routledge. Search in Google Scholar

Miranda-García, Antonio, Javier Calle-Martín, David Moreno-Olalla, Laura Esteban-Segura, Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre, Teresa Marqués-Aguado, Graham D. Caie, Santiago González-Fernández-Corugedo and Alejandro Alcaraz-Sintes. 2015. The Málaga Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose (MCLMESP). Málaga: University of Málaga. Available from: https://hunter.uma.es. Search in Google Scholar

Nini, Andrea. 2019. The Multi-Dimensional Analysis Tagger. In T. Berber-Sardinha and M. Veirano Pinto (eds.). Multi-dimensional analysis: Research methods and current issues, 67–94. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Search in Google Scholar

Pontrandolfo, Gianluca. 2019. Corpus methods in legal translation studies. In Ł. Biel, J. Engberg, R. Martín-Ruano and V. Sosoni (eds.). Research methods in legal translation and interpreting. Crossing methodological boundaries, 13–28. London: Routledge. Search in Google Scholar

Rissanen, Matti. 2000. Standardization and the language of early statutes. In L. Wright (ed.). The development of standard English 13001800, 117–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Rodríguez-Puente, Paula. 2011. Introducing the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports: Structure and compilation techniques. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 17: 99–120. Search in Google Scholar

Rodríguez-Puente, Paula. 2019. Interpersonality in legal written discourse: A diachronic analysis of personal pronouns in law reports, 1535-present. In T. Fanego and P. Rodríguez-Puente (eds.). Corpus-based research on variation in English legal discourse, 171–199. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Search in Google Scholar

Rodríguez-Puente, Paula. 2020. Historical legal discourse: British law reports. In E. Friginal and J. A. Hardy (eds.). The Routledge handbook of corpus approaches to discourse analysis, 499–517. New York: Routledge. Search in Google Scholar

Rodríguez-Puente, Paula, Teresa Fanego, María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo, Cristina Blanco-García and Iván Tamaredo. 2018. Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535–1999 (CHELAR), v.2. University of Santiago de Compostela: Research Unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization, Department of English and German. Search in Google Scholar

Sánchez, Aquilino and Pascual Cantos. 2017. Predictability of word forms (types) and lemmas in linguistic corpora. A case study based on the analysis of the CUMBRE Corpus: An 8-million-word corpus of contemporary Spanish. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 2 (2): 259–280. Search in Google Scholar

Swales, John. 1981. Aspects of article introductions. Birmingham: University of Ashton. Search in Google Scholar

Swales, John. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Taavitsainen Irma, Päivi Pahta and Martti Mäkinen (eds.). 2005. Middle English Medical Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Search in Google Scholar

Taavitsainen Irma, Päivi Pahta, Turo Hiltunen, Martti Mäkinen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö. 2010. Early Modern English Medical Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Search in Google Scholar

Tiersma, Peter M. 1999. Legal language. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Search in Google Scholar

Trklja, Aleksandar and Karen McAuliffe. 2018. The European Union case law corpus (EUCLCORP): A multilingual parallel and comparative corpus of EU court judgments. In A.U. Frank, C. Ivanovic, F. Mambrini, M. Passarotti and C. Sporleder (eds.). Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Corpus-based Research in the Humanities: CRH-2. Vol. 1, Gerastree Proceedings, 217–226. Vienna, Austria: Second Workshop on Corpus-Based Research in the Humanities. Search in Google Scholar

Ungerer, Friedrich, Kristina Schneider and Birte Bös. 2000. Rostock Newspaper Corpus. Rostock: Rostock University. Search in Google Scholar

Williams, Christopher. 2004. Legal English and plain language: An introduction. ESP Across Cultures 1: 111–124. Search in Google Scholar

Williams, Christopher. 2007. Tradition and change in legal English. Verbal constructions in prescriptive texts. Bern: Peter Lang. Search in Google Scholar

Williams, Christopher. 2013. Changes in the verb phrase in legislative language in English. In B. Aarts, J. Close, G. Leech and S. Wallis (eds.). The verb phrase in English. Investigating recent language change with corpora, 353–371. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search in Google Scholar

Wydick, Richard C. 2005. Plain English for lawyers. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. Search in Google Scholar