PROVO, Utah, Feb. 3, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- BYU Law School, one of the nation's leading law schools focused on innovation in Corpus Linguistics, Entrepreneurship, Poverty Alleviation, and Religious Freedom, today kicked off the 2017 BYU Law Review Symposium "Law & Corpus Linguistics." Designed to discuss this emerging field of academic study, the Symposium brings together legal scholars, prominent corpus linguistics scholars, and judges who have employed corpus linguistics analysis in their decisions.
"Legal scholars and judges have only recently begun to tap the potential of corpus linguistics, and BYU Law is pleased to be driving a nationwide dialogue around the legal implications of corpus linguistics and analysis," said BYU Law Dean Gordon Smith. "This year's Symposium builds upon our inaugural Law and Corpus Linguistics Conference by bringing together leading linguists and legal theorists to explore ways to facilitate the use of this method by scholars and judges."
BYU Law is pioneering the study of law and corpus linguistics, a methodology for understanding the meaning of words by analyzing naturally occurring language in large collections of texts called "corpora." For the past four years, BYU Law has offered the only course on law and corpus linguistics in the United States.
Speakers at the Symposium include Justice Thomas R. Lee, Utah Supreme Court; Lawrence B. Solum, Georgetown Law School; Lawrence Solan, Brooklyn Law School; Edward Finegan, University of Southern California, and Mark Davies, Brigham Young University, Linguistics.
BYU Law's leadership in Corpus Linguistics is fueled by BYU linguistics professor Mark Davies, the creator/developer of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a billion-word online corpus-based study of language and culture, and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), which identifies semantic changes and illustrates a word's increasing or decreasing popularity since 1810. Each month, nearly 70,000 people – including linguists, translators, teachers, students, district judges and Supreme Court justices – access the COCA and COHA to learn how English is really spoken by native speakers and determine the proper origins and meanings of words.
For more information on BYU Law visit http://www.law.byu.edu/. For more information on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) visit http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/. For more information on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) visit http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
About BYU Law School
Founded in 1971, the J. Reuben Clark Law School has grown into one of the nation's leading law schools – recognized for its innovation in Corpus Linguistics, Entrepreneurship, Poverty Alleviation and Religious Freedom. Since 2000, the Law School has served more than 1,000 students in its academic and organizational work who now are making an impact in communities around the world. In its most recent rankings, National Jurist ranked BYU Law as the best value private law school in the country and U.S. News & World Report ranked BYU Law 38th out of 196 schools for the best law school in the country. For more information visit http://www.law.byu.edu/.
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SOURCE BYU Law School