We are pleased to announce the release of a new, specialized linguistic corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary English Legal Decisions., 1950-2021 (CoCELD).
CoCELD has been compiled by Paula Rodríguez-Puente and David Hernández-Coalla at the University of Oviedo. It contains over 700,000 words of judicial decisions issued in the UK between 1950 and 2021. The corpus is presented in two formats: as plain text and with POS-annotation.
CoCELD complements other corpora in which judicial are included, such as the House of Lords Corpus (HOLJ; 2001-2003), the British Law Report Corpus (BLaRC; 2008-2010) and the Corpus of English Historical Law Reports, 1535-1999 (CHELAR). CoCELD is specifically designed to analyze recent changes in the language of judicial decisions which may have been trigered since the emergence of the Plain Language Movement in the 1970s, but it also enables researchers to investigate the language of judicial decisions synchronically and over the past few years.
CoCELD is available for free under request to Paula Rodríguez-Puente (rodriguezppaula@uniovi.es). An open access folder hosted on the cloud can be accessed under the conditions laid down in the User Agreement. Further information about the corpus and its texts is provided in the corpus documentation.
We hope this information is of your interest and we kindly encourage you to request a copy of CoCELD and contribute to broaden our knowledge of the language of judicial decisions.
Kind regards,
David & Paula
