LINGUIST List 12.2165

Wed Sep 5 2001

Qs: Text Corpora/Frequency Lists, Legal Discourse

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Anna-Maria De Cesare, corpus, frequency list, etc.
2. Matthew T. Bell, discourse structure and law

Dear linguists,

I would be interested in finding out what you know about corpus
linguistics and frequency dictionaries available for the English
language as well as for the Romance languages (about each one
separately or even combined - if that exists at all). I would greatly
appreciate if you could give me references ranging from text corpus
(on CD-ROMs, on line, or else), frequency lists
(vocabularies/dictionaries, or else), data banks, as well as some
relevant literature on the field. Let me also add that I am interested
in both the modern and earlier stages of English and the Romance
languages.

Of course, I will post the results of this inquiry if anything 
interesting comes up.

Thank you so much in advance for your time,

Anna-Maria De Cesare
Lecturing Fellow in Italian
Duke University
decesareduke.edu

Dear Linguist List,

I'm curious as to whether any are aware of (current or recent)
projects or papers dealing with either the discourse structure of
legal argumentation, esp. judicial opinions, or else features that
could serve studying legal discourse. So far I am aware of general
papers on the subject of discourse segmentation (Mann and Thompson,
Grosz and Sidner, Moore and Pollack); but wonder if there are not
papers dealing with the legal genre specifically.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

- Matt Bell
 Graduate Student
 University of Pittsburgh