International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2026

This editorial introduces a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics on corpus perspectives on legal discourse. It first situates corpus-based research within the broader empirical tradition of language and law studies, tracing the emergence of a ‘corpus turn’ from the mid-1990s onwards and its contribution to the analysis of legal texts. It then identifies established and emerging trends exemplified by the five studies in the issue, which span jurisdictions in Europe, North America and Asia and draw on both common law and civil law traditions. Four trends are discussed: the continued dominance of written legal discourse as the core object of corpus analysis; comparison as a foundational methodological design principle; the role of intertextuality, interdiscursivity and genre networks in situating legal texts within broader institutional and societal contexts; and the spectrum from impersonal, informational legal language to more involved, evaluative discourse in judicial settings.

This paper sets out a bilingual (English and French) corpus-based approach to quantify divergence in terminology between legal discourse and news articles, triangulating a series of complementary indicators of frequency difference, predominant terms and absent terms. This methodology is then applied to purpose-built corpora consisting of EU legal discourse and newspaper articles on the subject of migration in English and French, illustrating the relevance of an approach to measuring shifts in terminological distance. The results of such a study can provide insights into the level of comprehensibility of legal discourse, which is fundamental to ensuring access to justice. This context makes it vitally important to develop such a methodology, which empirically measures whether the terminology used in EU legal discourse is continuing to diverge from language used in non-specialist settings.

Stance is deep-rooted in law, where legal values can never stand in a vacuum. Despite a growing body of literature on stance in legal genres, cross-genre examinations conducted from a corpus-based perspective still leave room for improvement. This study conducts a cross-genre examination of how legal professionals express stance across three legal genres, i.e. legislation, judgments, and legal academic articles. By adopting a corpus-based approach, evidence-based insights are provided into the general profile of stance expressions in legal settings, as well as the distribution of stance features across the three legal genres. Additionally, this study delineates a continuum of stance in law, which illustrates the variation in stance expressions by categorizing them as objective or subjective, certain or uncertain, direct or indirect, and explicit or implicit. The findings suggest that stance may serve as a discourse anchor to help frame legal rules, construct legal facts, and convey legal values.

This study applies full Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) to examine linguistic variation in the Polish Eurolect — a hybrid variety shaped by translation and institutional constraints within the European Union — by comparing it to the national variety. Using a corpus of key institutional registers (legal acts, judgments, administrative reports, and citizen-oriented websites), we identify four dimensions of variation: Argumentative vs Informational, Engaged Instruction vs Distanced Authority, Prescriptive vs Narrative, and Lexical Richness. The findings reveal notable differences between how supranational and national institutions communicate. EU legal acts and judgments show greater prescriptiveness, legal referencing, and argumentative structuring compared to their Polish counterparts. EU websites have less engagement and explanatory strategies while EU reports favour a less distanced style. The findings map variation and group institutional registers, thereby visualizing similarities and differences between supranational and national institutional communication.

The aim of this paper is to combine a quantitative analysis of indicators of pragmatic argumentation with a qualitative investigation of the argument scheme in a corpus of Supreme Court of Ireland’s judgments. The quantitative analysis indicates that the Supreme Court’s argumentation tends to support judicial standpoints by focusing on the negative impact of alternative lines of argument, whether from other judgments or the parties’ submissions. Alternatively, the argumentation draws the relevant audience’s attention to legal values and principles underlying legislation or the Constitution. The qualitative study of Heneghan v. Minister for Housing, furthermore, shows how the Court’s pragmatic argumentation combined its positive and negative variant, and responded to the relevant critical questions. Overall, the use of corpus-informed tools played a central role in the study of indicators of argumentation as “‘entry points” into the construction of judicial argumentation (Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2021), which is fruitfully integrated with insights from argumentation theory.

This study presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis examining the semantic frames of (Dis)Interest and (Un)Importance in leave to appeal decisions of the HKSAR appellate courts. With the use of two corpora — Approve (67,694 tokens) and Dismiss (143,462 tokens) — the research investigated the construction and use of (Dis)Interest and (Un)Importance frames. A further distinction of performative versus descriptive use informed the analysis. In terms of frame construction, decision writers used four frame elements: Trigger, Explanation, Degree, and Experiencer. The findings show that (Un)Importance frames appeared three times more frequently than (Dis)Interest frames. Reflecting the inherent nature of the outcome, Approve writers used significantly more performative Interest and Importance; Dismiss writers used significantly more performative Disinterest. Dismiss writers also used significantly more descriptive Importance in refutation structures. Qualitative analysis revealed that Approve decisions featured more straightforward performative framing, whereas Dismiss decisions displayed a complex interplay of performative and descriptive elements.