This book offers an innovative, corpus-driven approach to historical legal discourse. It is the first monograph to examine textual standardization patterns in legal and administrative texts on the basis of lexical bundles, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of medieval and early modern legal texts. The book's focus is on legal language in Scotland, where law--with its own nomenclature and its own repertoire of discourse features--was shaped and marked by the concomitant standardizing of the vernacular language, Scots, a sister language to the English of the day.

Joanna Kopaczyk's study is...