Concordance
Definition
A list of all occurrences of a target word in a corpus, shown in their surrounding context (KWIC: keyword in context). Concordance analysis lets a linguist assess the most common uses of a disputed term, what it typically modifies, and whether a claimed usage pattern exists or is statistically rare.
- Field
- Forensic linguistics
- Format
- KWIC, keyword in context
- Use
- Analyse usage patterns of a disputed term
- Application
- Contract disputes, statutory interpretation
Common questions
How does concordance analysis help resolve a contract or statutory interpretation dispute?+
By listing every occurrence of the disputed word or phrase across a comparable corpus with surrounding context, a linguist can show whether a party's proposed meaning matches typical usage, what the term usually collocates with, and whether an unusual reading claimed in litigation is actually rare or unattested in ordinary use.
What corpus is used to build a concordance in a legal dispute, the document itself or an external reference corpus?+
Both are typically used together, an internal concordance of the disputed document or related correspondence shows how the parties themselves used the term, while an external general-language or genre-specific reference corpus shows how the term is used in the wider language community, and the two are compared to assess whether the disputed usage is idiosyncratic.
Related terms
- Corpus Jurisprudence
- The practice of using corpus analysis as evidence in statutory or constitutional interpretation. Associated in the US with Brigham Young University's Law...
- Corpus Linguistics
- The study of language through large, principled collections of texts or transcripts. In forensic work, corpus methods are used to count how...
- New Originalism
- A US constitutional and statutory interpretation theory associated with scholars including Antonin Scalia, Randy Barnett, and Jack Balkin, holding that courts should...
- Ordinary Meaning
- The meaning a reasonable person with ordinary linguistic competence would assign to a word or phrase. It is the default canon of...
- Syntactic Ambiguity
- Ambiguity arising from the grammatical structure of a sentence rather than from any individual word's meaning. The Oxford comma case is a...