Formulaicity in Scots historical corpora and the lexical bundles method
This paper draws attention to the newly available corpus resources for the study of Older Scots, and to the application of the lexical bundles method (Biber et al. 1999) in historical specialized discourse. The discussion concentrates on the method...
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This paper draws attention to the newly available corpus resources for the study of Older Scots, and to the application of the lexical bundles method (Biber et al. 1999) in historical specialized discourse. The discussion concentrates on the method adopted from present-day corpus research, which illuminates historical questions which have so far proved unanswerable, e.g. which multi-word elements in text are stable and repetitive. I applied lexical bundles to legal and administrative texts written in Scots, to observe the degree of formulaicity in early specialized discourse. The results of the study show that the Scottish documents contain highly formulaic long lexical bundles (8-grams and 7-grams) when juxtaposed with other specialized discourse texts, such as the Bible. Similarly, shorter bundles helped to identify the impressive degree of formulaicity in comparison to speechbased legal genres, such as trials and depositions (Culpeper/Kytö 2010).
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