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The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs

Author : Joanna Kopaczyk

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 368 pages

File Size : 13,80 MB

Release : 2013-08-15

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 0190243317

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Book Description

This book offers an innovative, corpus-driven approach to historical legal discourse. It is the first monograph to examine textual standardization patterns in legal and administrative texts on the basis of lexical bundles, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of medieval and early modern legal texts. The book's focus is on legal language in Scotland, where law--with its own nomenclature and its own repertoire of discourse features--was shaped and marked by the concomitant standardizing of the vernacular language, Scots, a sister language to the English of the day. Joanna Kopaczyk's study is based on a unique combination of two methodological frameworks: a rigorous corpus-driven data analysis and a pragmaphilological, context-sensitive qualitative interpretation of the findings. Providing the reader with a rich socio-historical background of legal discourse in medieval and early modern Scottish burghs, Kopaczyk traces the links between orality, community, and law, which are reflected in discourse features and linguistic standardization of legal and administrative texts. In this context, the book also revisits important ingredients of legal language, such as binomials or performatives. Kopaczyk's study is grounded in the functional approach to language and pays particular attention to referential, interpersonal, and textual functions of lexical bundles in the texts. It also establishes a connection between the structure and function of the recurrent patterns, and paves the way for the employment of new methodologies in historical discourse analysis.



The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs

Author : Joanna Kopaczyk

Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA

Page : 356 pages

File Size : 47,39 MB

Release : 2013-09-12

Category : Foreign Language Study

ISBN : 0199945152

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Book Description

The first monograph to examine textual standardization patterns in legal and administrative texts on the basis of lexical bundles, drawing from a comprehensive corpus of medieval and early modern legal texts



The Multilingual Origins of Standard English

Author : Laura Wright

Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Page : 546 pages

File Size : 43,89 MB

Release : 2020-09-07

Category : Foreign Language Study

ISBN : 3110687542

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Book Description

Textbooks inform readers that the precursor of Standard English was supposedly an East or Central Midlands variety which became adopted in London; that monolingual fifteenth century English manuscripts fall into internally-cohesive Types; and that the fourth Type, dating after 1435 and labelled ‘Chancery Standard’, provided the mechanism by which this supposedly Midlands variety spread out from London. This set of explanations is challenged by taking a multilingual perspective, examining Anglo-Norman French, Medieval Latin and mixed-language contexts as well as monolingual English ones. By analysing local and legal documents, mercantile accounts, personal letters and journals, medical and religious prose, multiply-copied works, and the output of individual scribes, standardisation is shown to have been preceded by supralocalisation rather than imposed top-down as a single entity by governmental authority. Linguistic features examined include syntax, morphology, vocabulary, spelling, letter-graphs, abbreviations and suspensions, social context and discourse norms, pragmatics, registers, text-types, communities of practice social networks, and the multilingual backdrop, which was influenced by shifting socioeconomic trends.



Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe

Author : Jackson W. Armstrong

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 305 pages

File Size : 38,72 MB

Release : 2020-11-24

Category : Education

ISBN : 0429553455

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Book Description

Drawing together an international team of historians, lawyers and historical sociolinguists, this volume investigates urban cultures of law in Scotland, with a special focus on Aberdeen and its rich civic archive, the Low Countries, Norway, Germany and Poland from c. 1350 to c. 1650. In these essays, the contributors seek to understand how law works in its cultural and social contexts by focusing specifically on the urban experience and, to a great extent, on urban records. The contributions are concerned with understanding late medieval and early modern legal experts as well as the users of courts and legal services, the languages and records of law, and legal activities occurring inside and outside of official legal fora. This volume considers what the expectations of people at different status levels were for the use of the law, what perceptions of justice and authority existed among different groups, and what their knowledge was of law and legal procedure. By examining how different aspects of legal culture came to be recorded in writing, the contributors reveal how that writing itself then became part of a culture of law. Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe: Scotland and its Neighbours c.1350–c.1650 combines the historical study of law, towns, language and politics in a way that will be accessible and compelling for advanced level undergraduates and postgraduate to postdoctoral researchers and academics in medieval and early modern, urban, legal, political and linguistic history.



Message and Medium

Author : Caroline Tagg

Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Page : 360 pages

File Size : 13,27 MB

Release : 2020-06-08

Category : Foreign Language Study

ISBN : 3110670895

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Book Description

Studies of digital communication technologies often focus on the apparently unique set of multimodal resources afforded to users and the development of innovative linguistic strategies for performing mediatised identities and maintaining online social networks. This edited volume interrogates the novelty of such practices by establishing a transhistorical approach to the study of digital communication. The transhistorical approach explores language practices as lived experiences grounded in historical contexts, and aims to identify those elements of human behaviour that transcend historical boundaries, looking beyond specific developments in communication technologies to understand the enduring motivations and social concerns that drive human communication. The volume reveals long-term patterns in the indexical functions of seemingly innovative written and multimodal resources and the ideologies that underpin them, and shows that methods are not necessarily contingent on their datasets: historical analytic frameworks can be applied to digital data and newer approaches used to understand historical data. These insights present exciting opportunities for English language researchers, both historical and modern.



A History of the Scots Language

Author : Robert McColl Millar

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 209 pages

File Size : 36,17 MB

Release : 2023-09-15

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 0192609459

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Book Description

This book provides a thorough yet approachable history of the Scots language, a close relative of Standard English with around 1.5 million speakers in Scotland and several thousand in Ireland, according to the 2011 census. Despite the long history of Scots as a language of high literature, it has been somewhat neglected and has often been treated as a dialect of Standard English. In this book, Robert McColl Millar explores both sociolinguistic and structural developments in the history of Scots, bringing together these two threads of analysis to offer a better understanding of linguistic change. The first half of the book tracks the development of Scots from its beginnings to the modern period, while chapters in the second half offer detailed descriptions of Scots historical phonology and morphosyntax, and of the historical development of Scots lexis. A History of the Scots Language will be a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate students of the modern and historical Scots language, but will also be of interest to those studying the history of English and other Germanic languages.



Communities of Practice in the History of English

Author : Joanna Kopaczyk

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 301 pages

File Size : 43,95 MB

Release : 2013-10-10

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027271208

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Book Description

Languages change and they keep changing as a result of communicative interactions and practices in the context of communities of language users. The articles in this volume showcase a range of such communities and their practices as loci of language change in the history of English. The notion of communities of practice takes its starting point in the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and refers to groups of people defined both through their membership in a community and through their shared practices. Three types of communities are particularly highlighted: networks of letter writers; groups of scribes and printers; and other groups of professionals, in particular administrators and scientists. In these diverse contexts in England, Scotland, the United States and South Africa, language change is not seen as an abstract process but as a response to the communicative needs and practices of groups of people engaged in interaction.



English Historical Linguistics 2008

Author : Hans Sauer

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 291 pages

File Size : 27,11 MB

Release : 2012-08-09

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 902727357X

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Book Description

The fifteen papers selected for Volume II of English Historical Linguistics 2008 have a different emphasis than those in Volume I (CILT 314, Lenker et al. 2010). Nine concentrate on the development of the English vocabulary and six on historical text linguistics, including the development of text-types and of politeness strategies. Of those in the former group, three have their emphasis on etymology, three on semantic fields, and three on word-formation, although some cover more than one of these areas. The topics include: the treatment of etymological problems in the OED; deverbal derivations formed from native verbs and from loan-verbs; the role of metaphor and metonymy in the evolution of word-fields. The field of historical text linguistics is introduced by a general survey, which is followed by more specific studies focussing on 15th-century legal and administrative texts from Scotland, on early 15th-century women’s mystical writings, on medical recipes from the 16th to the 18th centuries and on pauper letters from 18th-century Essex. The book should appeal to scholars interested in English etymology, the history of semantic fields and of word-formation, as well as in historical text linguistics, politeness strategies and standardization. It provides not only theoretical considerations but also a wealth of case studies.



Law and Legal Consciousness in Medieval Scotland

Author : Hector L. MacQueen

Publisher : BRILL

Page : 615 pages

File Size : 21,27 MB

Release : 2023-10-20

Category : History

ISBN : 9004683763

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Book Description

This book explores the rise of a Scottish common law from the twelfth century on despite the absence until around 1500 of a secular legal profession. Key stimuli were the activity of church courts and canon lawyers in Scotland, coupled with the example provided by neighbouring England’s common law. The laity’s legal consciousness arose from exposure to law by way of constant participation in legal processes in court and daily transactions. This experience enabled some to become judges, pleaders in court and transactional lawyers and lay the foundations for an emergent professional group by the end of the medieval period.



The Language of Canon Law

Author : Judith Hahn

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 241 pages

File Size : 26,48 MB

Release : 2023

Category : Canon law

ISBN : 0197674240

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Book Description

"This study explores the language of canon law, the legal order of the Roman Catholic Church. It seeks to bring the language of canon law into the law and language debate and in doing so better understand how the Roman Catholic Church communicates as a legal institution. It ex-amines the function of canon law language in ecclesiastical communications. It studies the character of canonical language, the grammar and terminology of canon law, and how it makes use of linguistic tricks and techniques to create its typical sound. It discusses the com-prehension difficulties that arise out of ambiguities in the law, out of transfer problems be-tween legal and common language, and out of canon law's confusing mix of legal, doctrinal, and moral norms. It reviews the potential consequences of a plain language agenda in the church. This includes an evaluation of whether dead Latin is the appropriate language for a global and cross-cultural legal order such as canon law, and a discussion of how to improve multi-language communication. It takes a closer look at ecclesiastical interpretation theory. It examines forensic language, the language of ecclesiastical tribunals, in its problematic shifting between orality and textuality"--