The Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535–1999 (CHELAR): A resource for analysing the development of English legal discourse

The Corpus of Contemporary English Legal Decisions, 1950–2021 (CoCELD): A new tool for analysing recent changes in English legal discourse

“…Specialised corpora containing samples of legal documents have also emerged over the past few years, probably in response to a growing interest in legal language which resulted from developments in (applied) linguistics and the social sciences (Bhatia 1987: 227). Comprehensive overviews of specialised corpora are provided by Pontrandolfo (2012) and Fanego et al (2017). Our focus here is on corpora which, like CoCELD, contain judicial decisions.…”

“…in ARCHER and CHELAR), in building CoCELD we included samples of around 2,500 words. As with the compilation of CHELAR (see Rodríguez-Puente 2011; Fanego et al 2017), we removed front matter (i.e. title, names of appellants, judges, etc.)…”

Review of Fanego, Teresa and Paula Rodríguez-Puente eds. 2019. Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN: 978-9-027-20235-2. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91

“…The authors investigate law reports from 1700 to 1999 using the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports (CHELAR; see Fanego et al 2017), comparing them with the registers of fiction, newspaper articles, and science research articles. They observe that the patterns of change for law reports are generally more similar to scientific prose than to fiction or newspaper writing.…”

Mark-up and Annotation in the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports (CHELAR): Potential for Historical Genre Analysis

“…An Example of Modest Annotation and Mark-up: The corpus of Historical englisH law reports CHELAR is a specialized corpus consisting of law reports, records of judicial decisions that can be used as precedent in subsequent cases. It contains approximately half a million words and is structured into nine periods of fifty years each, running from 1535 to 1999 (Rodríguez-Puente 2011; Fanego et al 2017). 1 Following Geoffrey Leech's assertion that "adding annotation to a corpus is giving 'added value'" to it (2005, section 1) and in order to take advantage of the multiple and varied forms of annotation at the disposal of corpus builders, the initial version of the corpus (2016) was released in two different formats: (1) as raw text files, and (2) with part-of-speech (POS) annotation.…”

“…Although they are closely related concepts, annotation here refers to the encoding of linguistic features, whereas mark-up is used for the code system that contains information about the text itself. CHELAR is a specialized corpus consisting of law reports or records of judicial decisions (Fanego et al 2017). The corpus was made available in 2016 as plain text and with part-of-speech (POS) annotation, and was continued in 2018 by CHELAR v.2, an extensively revised and enhanced second version of the corpus that has served as the basis for the creation of its TEI-XML edition.…”