{"id":17774,"date":"2019-01-30T13:28:49","date_gmt":"2019-01-30T21:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17774"},"modified":"2019-01-30T13:28:49","modified_gmt":"2019-01-30T21:28:49","slug":"corpus-linguistics-and-the-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/01\/30\/corpus-linguistics-and-the-law\/","title":{"rendered":"corpus linguistics and the law"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Aaron Blake has a post on The Washington Post<\/cite>\u2019s Fix<\/a> that some of y\u2019all may find interesting, as it touches on the use of corpus linguistics in legal argument.\r\n

I find the concept of corpus linguistics very interesting\u2014in essence, it\u2019s the ability to look at large quantities of written or spoken text and analyze it. It\u2019s looking at how language does<\/I> work, often in opposition to how it should<\/i> work, or how we think<\/i> it works. There are limitations to it, of course, which I\u2019m in no position to understand, but from my angle it looks like an incredibly powerful tool. Particularly since legal arguments seem to stand on the question of what a particular word or phrase meant to the writers of a piece of legislation or to the people they were writing for. It has been common for legal decisions to haul out dictionary definitions as being dispositive of what a term means<\/i>, and corpus linguistics is a different tool for looking at what a term means when people actually use it.\r\n

In this case, the term in question is emolument<\/i>, and under what circumstances a public official may be said to be in violation of the constitutional ban on accepting them. This has never been decided to everybody\u2019s satisfaction, and probably never will\u2014I don\u2019t think corpus linguistics is going to change anybody\u2019s mind about whether President Trump should be impeached or removed from office in any way. But I think it\u2019s an interesting technique, anyway, and Clark Cunningham<\/a> and Jesse Egbert<\/a> seem to me to make an excellent case in the amicus brief<\/a> that the common use was broader than the dictionary definition appears to indicate.\r\n

Thanks,
-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m tempted to strumpeth under the majis again just to screw with whatever corpus this blog becomes parsang in. You know? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[113,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corpus-linguistics","category-laws"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17774"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17775,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774\/revisions\/17775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}