A science mapping of studies on courtroom discourse with CiteSpace

The courtroom, as the most dramatic setting of legal language, is a rich linguistic domain for research; therefore, a science mapping study of the state of the art of this emerging field is of necessity. By CiteSpace V, the present study provides a comprehensive and up-to-date systematic review of the research on courtroom discourse, as presented by 379 article publications and their 10,538 references in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection from 1979 to 2021. According to statistics on publications by year, it appears that courtroom discourse research has experienced a period of silence (1979–1992), followed by an emergent period (1993–2005), before entering a period of considerable growth since 2006. Weak cooperative networks, extensive information base, multiple research fronts, and dynamic hotspots of courtroom discourse research have been discovered. Courtroom discourse research focuses on three core topics: courtroom interpreting, the interaction between law, language, power, and ideology, and the investigation of courtroom trial structures. Linguistic communication issues are prominent in courtroom discourse. As far as courtroom subjects are concerned, there is an audience-oriented turn in the latest research front of courtroom discourse. The research hotspots have shifted from language ontology during the emergent period to consolidating and developing the theoretical foundations of courtroom discourse during the rapid development period. According to keyword clustering, stance studies and miscommunication research are significant research hotspots of courtroom discourse.

Julian Wyatt (2019): intertemporal linguistics in international law: beyond contemporaneous and evolutionary treaty interpretation

Intertemporal treaty interpretation has undergone decades of discussion with few consensuses being reached. In this background, interdisciplinary analysis has come to the stage and injects innovation into treaty interpretation. According to Julian Wyatt’s Intertemporal Linguistics in International Law: Beyond Contemporaneous and Evolutionary Treaty Interpretation, treaty terms can be divided according to semantic features with temporal sense-intention (TSI) examined, based on which one can figure out whether dynamic or static interpretation shall be applied. It offers systematic guidelines and new solutions to intertemporal treaty interpretation, which is conducive to promoting international rule of law.

Visualizing international studies on cyberspace sovereignty: concept, rationality, and legitimacy

This study visualizes the international cyberspace sovereignty studies collected in Web of Science Core Collection to construct knowledge bases, development status, and dynamic trends drawing on scientometric method by instrument CiteSpace (5.7.R5). The findings show that the international studies on cyberspace sovereignty have phased and interdisciplinary characteristics. Its research theories, perspectives, and methods will be affected by practical and legal environment in the international contexts. Additionally, this study discusses its rationality to gain the concept through temporal evolution, spatial variation, and linguistic rank; explores its legitimacy through existing necessity, Common Law of Nature spirit and Positive Law foundation; and finally puts forward its implementation path. Furthermore, the logical basis and jurisprudential basis have established the status of cyberspace sovereignty in international law.

Exploring digital economy: a sociosemiotic perspective

Digital technologies have transformed our lives with unimaginable speed and scale, delivering immense opportunities and daunting challenges and leading to the birth of the digital economy. China and the United States (US) are two leading countries in the digital economy in both size and growth rate. This study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the similarities and differences between the US and Chinese legislation from a sociosemiotic perspective. By comparing the high frequency words in the two purpose-built corpora, it can be noted that as digital economy, a social sign, has the characteristics of spatiality and temporality. The US federal legislation related to digital economy focuses more on security and protection and has more specific regulations in individual industries, while Chinese legislation is more concerned with the strategy and guideline of development of industries and technologies in digital economy. In the meantime, information infrastructure and information and communication technologies are identified as the foundation and core elements shared in the two countries’ digital economies. Such a corpus-based sociosemiotic exploration of digital economy can shed light on relevant studies in the discourse analysis of legal texts.

Legislative discourse of digital governance: a corpus-driven comparative study of laws in the European Union and China

Based on the self-compiled corpora of the European Union and Chinese laws on data governance, this study adopts a corpus-driven approach to comparatively study the legislative design of the EU and China on digital governance, especially on key issues such as data protection, data processing and utilization, and cross-border data transfer. It is found through corpus analysis that the EU has developed a relatively comprehensive data protection system, which internally focuses on the protection of individual data rights and externally sets high standards on the cross-border transfer of data. Despite the data protection paradigm as it manifests, the EU is facing new challenges on data exportation, data jurisdiction in the competitive digital marketplace. Shared the same concern on the data protection legislation, Chinese data law has made significant progress in personal data protection with the nascent enactment of Data Security Law and Personal Data Protection Law. Notably, Chinese legislation features the hierarchal taxonomy of data under the principle of the national security exception, while it requires more legislative skills, flexible response mechanisms, and more subordinate laws to prevent future data security threats. Moreover, the corpus-driven method conducted in this study provides evidential insights for the comparative legal textual studies across jurisdictions.

A sociosemiotic exploration of medical legislation reform in China (1990–2021)

The medical service system is an important guarantee for human rights to survival, health and development of every social member, and thus it is significant to explore, interpret and explain the diachronic construction for its legislative reform. In a corpus approach, the study firstly collects the medical-related statutes from 1990 to 2021 in China to build the P.R.C. Medical Legislation Corpus (PRCMLC), and analyzes the keywords and their collocation in the exploratory, explosive and expanding phase of the medical legislative reform. Secondly, from the perspectives of sociosemiotics, the PRCMLC data is combined with the concrete medical laws and regulations for further discussion of the MSS, MIS, DSS and PHS in legislative system. Thirdly, the study explores the core legislative ideas and the relationships among the subsystems in the diachronic analysis, which provide a general overview of the legislative objects, target, participants and mechanisms in the medical reform of China.

Terminology as a source of difficulty in translating international legal discourses: an empirical cross-genre study

Despite the persistent focus on terminology in legal translation studies, to date, no large-scale research has empirically explored the difficulty of terminology in translating legal genres. Approaches to translation difficulty in translation studies more broadly remain limited in scope. To fill this gap, a study was conducted to measure the difficulty associated with the translation of legal terminology and phraseology, as well as with terminology of other domains, in the LETRINT 1+ corpus, including nine representative genres of three institutional settings (the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization). For comparative purposes, four levels of translation difficulty were assigned to multiple terminological features by a group of specialized translators through a consensus-building process of annotation based on the cognitive effort estimated for translation decision-making. The difficulty scores obtained confirm the correlation between legal singularity and higher translation difficulty, as well as the connection of more commonly used legal terms and phrasemes, and core economic terms, with lower difficulty levels. The findings also provide evidence of the prominence of non-legal specialized terminology in institutional legal discourses, and the aggregate terminological difficulty levels of each genre examined, which can be particularly useful for informing translation quality assurance, project management and translator training.

A sociosemiotic interpretation of cultural heritage in UNESCO legal instruments: a corpus-based study

The past few decades have seen a plethora of interest in heritage studies in international law, as the legitimization of cultural heritage is a significant aspect of protecting the legacy of humanity’s collective memory, which is fully reflected in a series of international instruments on culture. This paper examines the meaning-making process of UNESCO legal documents on cultural heritage from a sociosemiotic perspective. The data for the corpus-based study were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively by applying the securitization theory to heritage studies. Research findings reveal three significant shifts in cultural heritage, i.e., from property to heritage, from tangible to intangible, and from material-centered to human-centered, which embodies the harmonious coexistence of humanity and nature, a philosophical idea embedded in traditional Chinese culture. As noted, terms targeting cultural heritage in UNESCO international instruments are the sign vehicle, generally mediated and shaped by social values, cultural beliefs, and conventional wisdom, etc. as a part of the interpretant, making different categories of heritage meaningful and interpretable. Characterized by temporality and spatiality, cultural heritage is subject to multiple interpretations. The meaning-making of international instruments for consideration is a sociosemiotic operation that can be construed through contextual factors and a process of social negotiation. This paper argues that a sociosemiotic approach to heritage studies is conducive to explicating the construction and deconstruction of heritage as discursive practices while offering some implications for future research.