Collocations in Law Texts in Late Middle English: Some Evidence Concerning Adverbs Ending in-lī

Abstract

The numerous large-scale research projects in progress focusing on the phraseology of modern languages evince the scholarly fascination for word-combinations because of their acknowledged relevance in both theoretical and applied linguistics. The reasons why some words tend to associate with others in a given order and at a given time in the history of a language are still a matter of conjecture. However, it is generally assumed that, whatever the circumstances of mental organisation turn out to be for speakers to associate some words, word-combinations must have ultimately developed in a cultural framework and been more dependent on lingo-cultural domains than on a statistical probability of co-occurrence.The aim of this paper is to study the collocational patterns of adverbs ending in -lī in a legal corpus of late Middle English. The findings will be contrasted with the data from a contemporary corpus of literary works. This literary corpus has been chosen as representative of a language which is supposed to be spoken and understood by lower and upper-middle classes alike by the end of the Middle English period. By comparing the legal corpus with the literary one, I intend to support the idea that the collocational evidence shown in this work also sets legalese apart from other varieties of Middle English.The study of set phrases, of which collocations are a subclass, introduces an interesting scholarly debate about the terminological character of the general categories and subcategories of phraseology. 1 With regard to the general categories of the phraseological system, Mel'čuk (1998: 24-30) uses the terms "set phrases" or "phrasemes" to refer to the total catalogue of word combinations. For Gläser (1998: 126) the whole inventory of idioms and phrases ("phrasicon") of a language is constituted by "phraseological units", whereas Cowie (1998: 5) andHowarth (1996) use the term "word combination". These general categories of the phraseological system may operate either as word-like units, organised at or below the level of the simple sentence, providing a specific semantic role, or as sentence-like units endowed with a pragmatic function. Mel'čuk (1988Mel'čuk ( , 1998 considers that word-like units are "semantic phrasemes", Gläser (1988Gläser ( , 1998 includes them under the term of "nomination", whereas Cowie (1988) calls them "composite" and Howarth (1996) "composite units". In contrast, the sentence-like units are identified as "pragmatemes"

Repetitions which are not repetitions: the non-redundant nature of tautological compounds

“…goods and chattels or last will and testament ; Ullmann 1977: 154). Iglesias-Rábade's (2011) study has shown that the use of synonyms had already appeared in Late Middle English legal texts (as observable in the use of collocations such as trewly and feithfully or mekely and devoutely ). This phenomenon can be explained by the fact that court proceedings were mostly in French during the early years of the English judicial system (Tiersma 1999: 31).…”