Abstract 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 reports the findings from a multidisciplinary and cross-institutional Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project called ‘Improving Voice Identification Procedures’ (IVIP). People harbour stereotypes about particular accents, and those judgements may be brought with them into the legal domain. Considering the potential consequences of accent judgements by witnesses and jurors, this study examines the relationship between ratings for characteristics and the likelihood of acting in certain criminal and non-criminal ways. 180 participants completed an accent judgement task, rating 10 regionally-accented British voices on a range of traits and behaviours using a wider variety of accents, behaviours and criminal offences than previous research. Results indicate that evaluations of perceived characteristics based on accent translate into evaluations of likely behaviours. Non-standard UK regional accents are generally perceived more negatively than a standard one, but not universally; non-English accents elicited more positive trait and behaviour ratings than English accents. Furthermore, although accents evaluated as low-status were generally more likely to behave criminally according to listeners, this varied according to the type of crime. The discussion explores the forensic implications of the relationships between perceived status and criminality, as well as discussing the significance of perceptions of perpetrators of sexual offences when compared to other offence types. We emphasise the need for nuanced understanding of how accents are evaluated when it comes to different crime types.

Drawing on observations and transcripts of trials and interviews with judges, advocates and intermediaries, the book provides an evaluation of cross-examination in trials involving vulnerable witnesses and the extent to which reforms are producing meaningful change.

This paper investigates how pronouns were used by UK government speakers to allocate responsibility to themselves and others in all 92 daily televised COVID-19 briefings that were held between March and June 2020. We identified the referent for every use of the first-person plural pronoun (1PL) as 'inclusive', 'exclusive', or 'ambiguous' and analysed the transitivity patterns in which these pronouns act as Participants. We argue that the UK government uses the inherent ambiguity of this pronoun to strategically mitigate their own responsibility for controlling the spread of the virus, while increasing the amount of responsibility to the general public. In doing so, we propose a transparent and replicable systematic method for identifying the referents of pronouns, which may be useful to other discourse analysts faced with the challenging task of pronoun resolution.

Technological intervention to support care areas that some people may not have access to is of paramount importance to promote sustainable development of good health and wellbeing. This study aims to explore the linguistic similarities and differences between human professionals and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) conversational agents in therapeutic dialogues. Initially, the MISTRAL-7B Large Language Model (LLM) is instructed to generate responses to patient queries to form a synthetic equivalent to a publicly available psychology dataset. A large set of linguistic features (e.g., text metrics, lexical diversity and richness, readability scores, sentiment, emotions, and named entities) is extracted and studied from both the expert and synthetically-generated text. The results suggest a significantly richer vocabulary in humans than the LLM approach. Similarly, the use of sentiment was significantly different between the two, suggesting a difference in the supportive or objective language used and that synthetic linguistic expressions of emotion may differ from those expressed by an intelligent being. However, no statistical significance was observed between human professionals and AI in the use of function words, pronouns and several named entities; possibly reflecting an increased proficiency of LLMs in modelling some language patterns, even in a specialised context (i.e., therapy). However, current findings do not support the similarity in sentimental nuance and emotional expression, which limits the effectiveness of contemporary LLMs as standalone agents. Further development is needed towards clinically validated algorithms.

Voice identification parades can be unreliable, as earwitness responses are error-prone. In this paper we tested performance across serial and sequential procedures, and varied pre-parade instructions, with the aim of reducing errors. The participants listened to a target voice and later attempted to identify it from a parade. In Experiment 1 they were either warned that the target may or may not be present (standard warning) or encouraged to consider responding ‘not present’ because of the associated risk of a wrongful conviction (strong warning). Signal detection analyses revealed greater sensitivity in parades with strong warnings. In contrast to previous findings, performance was similar on serial and sequential parades. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that this inconsistency was caused by the number of times participants heard the parades before responding. Taken together, our results suggest that adapting pre-parade instructions provides a simple way of reducing the risk of false identifications.

Historically, there has been less research carried out on earwitness than eyewitness testimony. However, in some cases, earwitness evidence might play an important role in securing a conviction. This paper focuses on accent which is a central characteristic of voices in a forensic linguistic context. The paper focuses on two experiments (Experiment 1, n = 41; Experiment 2, n = 57) carried out with participants from a wide range of various locations around the United Kingdom to rate the accuracy and confidence in recognizing accents from voices from England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland as well as looking at specificity of answers given and how this varies for these regions. Our findings show that accuracy is variable and that participants are more likely to be accurate when using vaguer descriptions (such as “Scottish”) than being more specific. Furthermore, although participants lack the meta-linguistic ability to describe the features of accents, they are able to name particular words and pronunciations which helped them make their decision.

This paper is a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the use of the word respect by the main advocates in the High Court and Supreme Court hearings of R v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the ‘Brexit case’). Courtroom discourse has received substantial research attention in pragmatics, and previous work has largely focused on notions of face and im/politeness exhibited in power-asymmetric encounters between lawyers and witnesses in hostile cross-examination. In contrast, this paper focuses on lawyer–judge interaction in appellate hearings and explores the ways in which advocates negotiate the task of making face-threats that are inherent to the discourse situation, while maintaining the levels of professional courtesy demanded by the institution. The word respect has a particular role in managing this balance, and has attached to it well-established implicit, indexical and professional meanings within the legal profession. The corpus analysis here shows that, although the advocates in question use respect in seemingly formulaic and ritualised ways, it is used to achieve multiple facework and interactional goals. Throughout the analysis we see advocates use respect when (dis)agreeing with judges, challenging opposing counsel and making recommendations to the court.