The Web as a legal language resource

Abstract

Abstract The literature has long explored the Web as corpus for language research and practice. However, little has been written on the Web as a legal language resource. This paper is aimed at exploring the Web as a tool which can provide answers to legal language queries. In this respect, it will show how Google advanced search and the WebCorp Web concordancer can shed light on legal language and bring recurrent patterns to the surface. To this aim, a few issues will be addressed touching upon the query search syntax, the choice of the best translation candidates, the extraction of frequent collocations, the noticing of high recurrences, etc. Considering the shortcomings and the advantages of Google advanced search and of the WebCorp Web concordancer, the paper findings will argue that the Web as corpus can be a reliable legal language resource as long as a selection of tools are used, and the query syntax is accurate.