The book offers an innovative, corpus-driven approach to historical legal discourse. It is the first monograph to examine textual standardization patterns in legal and administrative texts on the basis of lexical bundles, drawn from a comprehensive corpus of medieval and early modern legal texts. The focus is on Scotland, where Scots law, with its own nomenclature and its own repertoire of discourse features, was being shaped and marked by the concomitant standardizing of the vernacular language, Scots, a sister language to the English of the day. The study offers a unique combination of two m ... More

The book offers an innovative, corpus-driven approach to historical legal discourse. It is the first monograph to examine textual standardization patterns in legal and administrative texts on the basis of lexical bundles, drawn from a comprehensive corpus of medieval and early modern legal texts. The focus is on Scotland, where Scots law, with its own nomenclature and its own repertoire of discourse features, was being shaped and marked by the concomitant standardizing of the vernacular language, Scots, a sister language to the English of the day. The study offers a unique combination of two methodological frameworks: a rigorous corpus-driven data analysis, and a pragmaphilological, context-sensitive qualitative interpretation of the findings. Providing the reader with a rich socio-historical background of legal discourse in medieval and early modern Scottish burghs, this monograph traces the links between orality, literacy, and law, which are reflected in discourse features and linguistic standardization of legal and administrative texts. In this context, the book also revisits important ingredients of legal language, such as binomials. The study is grounded in the functional approach to language and pays attention to referential, interpersonal and textual functions of lexical bundles in the texts. It also establishes a connection between the structure and function of the recurrent patterns and paves the way for the employment of new methodologies in historical discourse analysis.