The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs
Standardization and Lexical Bundles (1380-1560)
Joanna Kopaczyk
Reviews and Awards
"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
