Legal Language of Scottish Burghs

This book offers an innovative, corpus-driven approach to historical legal discourse. It is the first monograph to examine textual standardization patterns in legal and administrative texts on the basis of lexical bundles, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of medieval and early modern legal texts. The book's focus is on legal language in Scotland, where law—with its own nomenclature and its own repertoire of discourse features—was shaped and marked by theconcomitant standardizing of the vernacular language, Scots, a sister language to the English of the day. Joanna Kopaczyk's study is based on a unique combination of two methodological frameworks: a rigorous corpus-driven data analysis and a pragmaphilological, context-sensitive qualitative interpretation of the findings. Providing the reader with a rich socio-historical background of legal discourse in medieval and early modern Scottish burghs, Kopaczyk traces the links between orality, community, and law, which are reflected in discourse features and linguistic standardization of legal andadministrative texts. In this context, the book also revisits important ingredients of legal language, such as binomials or performatives. Kopaczyk's study is grounded in the functional approach to language and pays particular attention to referential, interpersonal, and textual functions of lexicalbundles in the texts. It also establishes a connection between the structure and function of the recurrent patterns, and paves the way for the employment of new methodologies in historical discourse analysis.

"This study is impressive in its scope, ranging from a detailed description of the social organization and the practice of law in medieval Scottish burghs, to reporting the results of sophisticated corpus-driven linguistic investigations of Scottish legal documents. The study is especially innovative in its application of corpus analysis to identify lexical bundles, phraseological chunks of language that are used to structure texts, tracing textual standardization patterns in Scots legal and administrative texts based on the use of lexical bundles. As such, the book will become required reading for scholars from many subfields, including the study of legal discourse, historical discourse analysis, literacy and standardization, and the application of corpus-driven methods in historical textual analysis." --Douglas Biber, Northern Arizona University "This is so much more than a historical study of legal Scots; it shows the power of an interdisciplinary approach by combining some of the hottest techniques in historical corpus linguistics with rich assessments of the socio-pragmatic context. Scholarly yet reader-friendly; it should be on reading lists!" --Jonathan Culpeper, Lancaster University "Joanna Kopaczyk's book is a work which demands an audience beyond the specialists who might be attracted by its title. It is indeed an important intervention in the study of the specialised legal discourse which emerged in late medieval/Early Modern Scotland. However it is also an exciting contribution to the emerging field of 'pragmaphilology' or historical pragmatics, i.e. the study of how language works in complex historical contexts. The underpinning methodology for the book, drawing on the latest techniques in the analysis of electronic corpora, should be required reading for all researchers interested in such matters. I recommend it without qualification." --Jeremy Smith, University of Glasgow "The author provides useful advice, first on the difficults of extracting lexical bundles from a premodern corpus that contains a very significant amount of spelling variation as well as irregularities in word division and punctuation, and second on the methodological issues involved in analysis. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the grammatical structure and linguistic function of the bundles identified... It also provides a valuable demonstration of how new linguistic methodologies can be applied to historic corpora and will be read with profit by scholars using such corpora." --Speculum

Joanna Kopaczyk (Ph.D. Poznan, Poland, 2002) studies historical texts in context. She combines corpus linguistics with historical discourse analysis, especially in the study of specialized discourse in Scotland and England. She has delivered invited talks at linguistic departments in Poland, Germany, Finland and the UK, and presented her research at over thirty international conferences in the USA, Europe, and Australia, as well as in numerouspeer-reviewed publications, including a monograph on a Middle Scots dialect (2004).