Long lexical bundles and standardisation in historical legal texts
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Date
2012
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
Standardisation on the level of text is visible in the employment of stable and fixed expressions
for a specific textual purpose. When gauging the extent of standardisation in texts, one of the
parameters which should be taken into consideration is the length of such stable patterns. Since it
is more difficult, and therefore rarer, to reproduce long chunks of text in an unchanged form, such
a practice points towards greater standardisation. To explore the textual behaviour of long fixed
strings in legal texts, this paper concentrates on long lexical bundles built out of eight consecutive
elements (8-grams) and their frequency and function in historical legal texts. The database for this
pilot paper comprises two collections of legal and administrative texts written in Scots between
the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. The research results point to a considerable degree of
textual standardisation throughout the corpus and to the most prominent functions of long repetitive
chunks in historical legal discourse.
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This research is supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, grant nr N
N104 014337.
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Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 47.2-3 (2012), pp. 3-25