Corpus-based Analysis On American Court Cases

As an important tool in safeguarding the interests of nation and citizens, the law plays a significantrole in social life and permeates every aspect of life. It is an effective weapon to guarantee one’s legitimaterights and interests. That’s why it is an indispensable part of life. As a result, from the law-making toimplementation of the law, it highly requires the accuracy of legal language.The carrier of law is language, and language is the most important external manifestation of legalinformation. Law is made up and released by words, and language is the tool to express law. As a result,law cannot exist independently without language. But, ambiguity is the essential attributes of language, solaw inevitably has the character of ambiguity which will lead to a series of legal disputes.In the interpretation of the lawsuit of U.S. courts, if there is no exact definition or term in code orcontract, the court usually adopts the plain meaning rule which is also known as the literal rule. This rulemeans that by using the most natural, normal, and ordinary meaning of the language to explain theambiguous words. Traditionally, there are two ways for judges to determine the words’ plain and ordinarymeanings, one is by intuition, and the other is by searching the dictionary. But, there are some shortcomingsin these two kinds of ways.With the development and popularization of corpus linguistics, lawyers and judges began to usecorpus to seek evidences in courts. Corpus, as a new method for text analysis and linguistic resources,which has strong reliability and persuasion in observing and discovering the typical patterns and meaningsof language in use, especially the patterns and meanings based on probability judgment and theestablishment of the words and collocation. Nonetheless, effectively using the corpus, as well as problemsin using corpus, should be paid attention to. This thesis chooses four different American court cases which are related to plain meaning rule. Basedon the relevant theories of collocation, the extended unit of meaning, and the methodology of corpus-basedapproach, this thesis is to make a comprehensive analysis on these four American four cases in the corporaof Corpus of Contemporary American English（COCA）and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)which were created by Mark Davies. In order to guarantee the reliability and validity of this study, bothqualitative and quantitative approaches are employed by the author. This thesis tries to show that: meaningand form are inseparable, when studying the meaning of the vocabulary, one should treat the meaning andform as a whole; the meaning of the single word is not equal to the meaning of the collocation; collocationis highly context dependent, and different genres have different requirements on words’ collocation andusage; as a scientific research method, one should not just research on the positive side, but also payattention to the negative side of the language; even though the research words may not appear in the corpusused by scholar, it is hard to say that there is no such kind of usage, for the corpus may not large enough, orit is not typed in corpus yet.We hope that this research could provide some enlightenment on teaching and learning of vocabularyand English for special purposes, and could open up a new approach for the study of corpus and providemore accurate and convincing language evidence in court.