Joanna Kopaczyk: The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs: Standardization and Lexical Bundles 1380-1560, 2013 (original) (raw)

2015, International journal for the semiotics of law

One of the most striking experiences of my early days as a postgraduate student of medieval Scots law was an encounter with a twelfth-century charter which, apart from being written in Latin, might have served as a model or template for the land transfer documents ('dispositions') which I had learned how to draft the previous year in the undergraduate class called Conveyancing. Alliterative thoughts came into my head-conveyancing, conservatism, consistency, continuity-but also the question of when this seeming stability was first achieved, and how it crossed from Latin into the formal Scots-law English of my own day. Joanna Kopaczyk's fascinating study of legal language in Scottish towns from the late middle ages to the Reformation in Scotland does not address the conveyancing question but it raises similar issues about legal and administrative record-keeping, addressing them from the perspective of historical linguistics. She is interested in the tendency of both law and language towards standardization-'a set of norms which reduces the range of options and variety, and whose aim is to construct a reliable and authoritative point of reference' (p 1). She also wants 'to explore how the language of the law responded to the external conditions in which it was produced' (p 3). The book is thus a contribution to 'pragmaphilology', the study of the contextual aspects of historical texts. The basis for Dr Kopaczyk's investigation is three electronic or digital corpora: the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots, the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, and a transcript of the Wigtown Burgh Court Book 1512-1534 (Wigtown being a small county town in the rural southwest of Scotland). The Edinburgh and Helsinki

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