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Benefits and Drawbacks of Plain Legal English
No full textThe Plain Language Movement acted as the catalyst for the Plain Legal English Movement aimed at
questioning and challenging the clarity of legal language. Mellinkoff’s The Language of the Law
(1963) is one of the most influential publications to emphasise the defects of legal language. In the
search for precision and caution, legal English tends to be verbose, archaic and redundant (Wydick
1978; Tiersma 1999; Williams 2004 and 2011). Tiersma (1999, p. 51) posits that “lawyers seem to
have developed linguistic quirks that have little communicative function and serve mainly to mark
them as members of the legal fraternity”. Legal writing, in fact, is claimed to be “the largest body of
poorly written literature ever created” (Lindsey 1990, p. 2)
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Legal formulae ::exploring legal multi-words in English, Italian and French /
No full text"This book analyses and investigates the neutral legal formulae of the English common law and the Italian and French civil law traditions, together with those used in international settings such as the European Union. It explores the usage of English formulae (and of their Italian and French counterparts) that are mentioned in terms of service, national and EU legislation, and in national and European parliamentary debates. The author takes a comparative approach to analysing the various corpora, carrying out cross-analyses to allow understanding of the usage(s) in contexts of neutral legal formulae. This reveals insights into word frequencies in the three languages and legal systems, as well as in different genres, and the book goes on to compare the relative frequencies of the neutral formulae across the three languages to investigate their variety. This book will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners in fields including linguistics, law, and corpus-based legal translation. " -
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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