语料库证据在美国法庭应用的再审视

Revisiting the Use of the Corpus Evidence in the US Supreme Court

本文通过语料库驱动视角重新审视美国最高法院在"FCC诉AT&T"判案中对语料库证据的使用,分别从词源、词典、词性还原,以及语料库搭配分析等程序和步骤进行讨论,并通过语料库检索对案例的分析结果进行验证,试图说明:语料库研究"说有易,说无难";尽管语料库作为一个功能强大的方法和工具,在语言相关的理论和实践领域得到愈来愈广泛的应用,但并不是仅仅因为使用了语料库,就能保证结论的可靠性。关键的问题是,语料库是怎么被使用的。

This paper re-visits the use of the corpus evidence in the US supreme court in the case FCC v.AT&T,from the perspective of the corpus driven approach,and focuses our discussion on the use of etymology,dictionaries,lemma and collocation analysis attending in particular to their data retrieval and procedures.The original result is also put to verification using different corpora.The paper cautions that in using corpora it is'easy to say there is something there,but hard to say there is not',and that the corpus use as a powerful method and tool in expanding application areas does not warrant the reliability of the claims only from using corpora.The keystone is not whether one uses corpora,but how.