Category Archives: Dictionaries

March is becoming National Corpus-Analysis-in-Law Month

Coming soon in the Brigham Young University Law Review: “The Dictionary Is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning,” by Stephen Mouritsen.

Mouritsen, who is currently clerking on the Utah Supreme Court, has an MA in linguistics from BYU, with an emphasis on corpus linguistics. He studied under Mark Davies, who compiled the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical English. The appearance of his article at a time when blogospheric attention is being paid to the legal uses of corpus analysis (e.g., on at The Atlantic and on Language Log) is a nice bit of serendipity.

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On the use of dictionaries in statutory interpretation (first in a series)

From The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography, by Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell:

Most people would agree that words have meanings, sometimes multiple meanings. But meanings and dictionary senses aren’t the same thing at all. Meanings exist in infinite numbers of discrete communicative events, while the senses in a dictionary represent lexicographers’ attempts to impose some order on this babel. We do this by making generalizations (or abstractions) from the mass of available language data. These generalizations aim to make explicit the meaning distinctions which—in normal communication—humans deal with unconsciously and effortlessly. As such, the “senses” we describe do not have (and do not claim) any special status as “authoritative” statements about language.