Cover not available

In:Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics:
Edited by Joanna Kopaczyk and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 82] 2018
► pp. 159–186

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 7
Lexical bundles in Early Modern and Present-day English Acts of Parliament

 | University of Helsinki
Published online: 13 March 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.82.07leh
Abstract
This chapter analyses three-word sequences in Early Modern and Present-day English legal writing by defining their grammatical and functional distribution in Acts of Parliament. The method follows a corpus-driven approach: the lexical bundles are retrieved automatically from the corpus using frequency as the criterion. The study indicates that lexical bundles in acts extend to the textual level and reveals consistent word combinations on the level of the lexis. The study illustrates that the acts are established as a genre, and the overall distribution of both grammatical types and functions of bundles is rather similar in all the analysed periods. Nevertheless, textual organisation is more important in contemporary acts and textual links further become more specific, although early modern bundles already show textual patterning. Noun phrase and prepositional phrases also increase in contemporary acts, indicating a change to nominal writing conventions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The definition of lexical bundles
    • 2.1Bundles, legal language and genre conventions
    • 2.2Grammatical structure and the functions of lexical bundles
  • 3.The Corpus of Early Modern English Statutes and Acts of Parliament from 2015
  • 4.Method of analysis
  • 5.Distribution of lexical bundles in the historical and contemporary acts
  • 6.Distribution of lexical bundles across different grammatical categories
  • 7.The functions of bundles in legal writing
  • 8.Diachronic development of lexical bundles in the early modern acts
  • 9.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpora and tools
  • References
References (42)
Corpora and tools
Anthony, Laurence. 2014. AntConc 3.4.3. Corpus software. Tokyo: Waseda University. <[URL]>
Early English Books Online (EEBO). <[URL]>
Early English Books Online – Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). <[URL]>
The National Archives. Records of Public General Acts. <[URL]>
References
Aarts, Bas, López-Couso, María José & Méndez-Naya, Belén. 2012. Late Modern English: Syntax. In English Historical Linguistics, Vol. I, Alexander Bergs & Laurel J. Brinton (eds), 869–887. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Altenberg, Bengt. 1998. On the phraseology of spoken English: The evidence of current word-combinations. In Phraseology: Theory, Analysis and Applications, Anthony P. Cowie (ed.), 100–122. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baron, Alistair, Rayson, Paul & Archer, Dawn. 2009. Automatic standardization of spelling for historical text mining. In The Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2009, 309–312. College Park MD: University of Maryland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 2006. University Language: A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 23]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Conrad, Susan & Cortes, Viviana. 2004. If you look at …: Lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics 25(3): 371–405. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. Lexical bundles in speech and writing: An initial taxonomy. In Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech [Łódź Studies in Language 8], Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson & Tony McEnery (eds), 71–105. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany. 2013. Lexical frames in academic prose and conversation. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18(1): 109–135. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. Grammar emerging in the noun phrase: The influence of written language use. English Language and Linguistics 15(2): 223–250. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johanson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Breeze, Ruth. 2013. Lexical bundles across four legal genres. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18(2): 229–253. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carney, Edward. 1994. A Survey of English Spelling. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carroll, Ruth, Peikola, Matti, Salmi, Hanna, Varila, Mari-Liisa, Skaffari, Janne & Hiltunen, Risto. 2013. Pragmatics on the page. European Journal of English Studies 17(1): 54–71. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cortes, Viviana. 2013. The purpose of this study is to: Connecting lexical bundles and moves in research article introductions. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12(1): 33–43. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. Lexical bundles in published and student disciplinary writing: Examples from history and biology. English for Specific Purposes 23(4): 397–423. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Kytö, Merja. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Danet, Brenda. 1980. Language in the legal process. Law and Society Review 14(3): 445–564. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. 1985. Structures of news in the press. In Discourse and Communication: New Approaches to the Analysis of Mass Media Discourse and Communication, Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), 69–93. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick C. 1996. Sequencing in SLA: Phonological memory, chunking, and points of order. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18(1): 91–126. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Elton, Geoffrey Rudolph. 1983. Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Vol. 3: Papers and Reviews 1973–1981. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 1991. Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hoey, Michael. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. New York NY: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hyland, Ken. 2008. As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes 27: 4–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kopaczyk, Joanna. 2013a. The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs: Standardization and Lexical Bundles 1380–1560. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013b. Formulaic discourse across Early Modern English medical genres: Investigating shared lexical bundles. In Meaning in the History of English: Words and Texts in Context [Studies in Language Companion Series 148], Andreas H. Jucker, Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler & Nicole Studer-Joho (eds), 257–299. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. Long lexical bundles and standardisation in historical legal texts. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 47(2–3): 3–26.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. Terms and conditions: a comparative study of noun binomials in UK and Scottish legislation. In Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings: A Corpus-based Perspective, Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski & Gianluca Pontrandolfo (eds.), 160-185. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lehto, Anu. 2015a. Corpus of Early Modern English Statutes (1491–1707). Unpublished corpus. University of Helsinki.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015b. The Genre of Early Modern English Statutes: Complexity in Historical Legal Writing [Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 97]. Helsinki: Modern Language Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. Binomials and multinomials in Early Modern English parliamentary acts. In Binomials in the History of English: Fixed and Flexible, Joanna Kopaczyk & Hans Sauer (eds), 241–260. Cambridge: CUP.
McEnery, Tony, Xiao, Richard & Tono, Yukio. 2006. Corpus-based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book. New York NY: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meyer, Charles F. 2015. Corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to linguistic analysis: One and the same? In Developments in English: Expanding Electronic Evidence, Irma Taavitsainen, Merja Kytö, Claudia Claridge & Jeremy Smith (eds), 14–28. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moon, Rosamund. 1998. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-Based Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1976. Classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5: 1–23. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Swales, John. 2004. Research Genres: Exploration and Applications. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 6]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wray, Alison. 2002. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Cichosz, Anna, Łukasz Grabowski & Piotr Pęzik
2024. Formulaic language in Old English prose. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:3 ► pp. 467 ff. DOI logo
Rodríguez-Puente, Paula
2019. Interpersonality in legal written discourse. In Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 91], ► pp. 171 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue