The Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535–1999 (CHELAR): A resource for analysing the development of English legal discourse

In this article the authors report on the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535-1999 (CHELAR), a new specialised corpus of legal English which has been developed at the Research Unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization of the University of Santiago de Compostela. The arti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ICAME journal 2017-03, Vol.41 (1), p.53-82
Main Authors: Fanego, Teresa, Rodríguez-Puente, Paula, López-Couso, María José, Méndez-Naya, Belén, Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma, Blanco-García, Cristina, Tamaredo, Iván
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Corpus linguistics
Diachronic linguistics
English language
Grammaticalization
Language change
Language history
Law
Legal language
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Summary:In this article the authors report on the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535-1999 (CHELAR), a new specialised corpus of legal English which has been developed at the Research Unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization of the University of Santiago de Compostela. The article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a brief overview of the history of legal English and a more extended account and characterization of law reports, the raw material for CHELAR. Section 3 compares CHELAR to other existing synchronic and diachronic corpora of legal English. Section 4 explains the complex process in compiling CHELAR and its annotation system. The paper concludes with a section offering an outlook on CHELAR’s research possibilities.
ISSN:1502-5462
0801-5775
1502-5462
DOI:10.1515/icame-2017-0003