Between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to textual recurrence
Stanisław Goźdź‐Roszkowski · Studies in corpus linguistics · 2018
Abstract The article investigates the link between lexical and meaning patterns in the specialized discourse of judicial opinions. It presents an analysis of the N that pattern in a corpus of US Supreme Court opinions. The analysis looks at the distribution of a selection of nouns found in the pattern across different discourse functions. It is shown that judicial opinions use a range of status-indicating nouns in the N that pattern to perform five main functions: evaluation , cause , result , confirmation and existence . Yet, evaluation plays a central role in judicial writing and most status-indicating nouns are used to signal sites of contentions, i.e. challenged propositions are likely to be labelled as arguments , assumptions , notions or suggestions . By drawing on the concept of semantic sequence ( Hunston 2008 ), the analysis illustrates how corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches can complement one another to build a picture of common epistemological practices in the corpus of legal texts.