Discovering patterns and meanings. Corpus perspectives on phraseology in legal discourse

Abstract

This article attempts to demonstrate different perspectives on investigating legal terminology by focusing on various types of textual recurrence. It discusses the results of a corpus-based and corpus-driven analysis of discovery, a term central to the US trial practice and criminal proceedings. The analysis starts from investigating traditional collocational patterns, both nominal and verbal. It describes meanings resulting from the emerging co-occurrence patterns between the term and various word forms identified in its co-text. Then the paper proceeds to explore computer-generated clusters formed around discovery. Finally, this article refers to the concepts of semantic preference and semantic sequence (Hunston 2008) to show how discovery tends to be found with a range of different word forms albeit all belonging to the meaning group of’ limitation’ or ‘restriction’. The connotational value of the term is presented by providing some textual evidence of discovery found in co-texts where  writers express their unfavourable evaluation towards this legal concept. By drawing on Hunston’s (2008)  concept of semantic sequence, the analysis illustrates how corpus linguistics can complement more traditional approaches to terminology description. It is argued that only by combining various approaches  to  the study of word combinations is it possible to gain important insights  into the phraseological behavior  of legal terms.