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Part of
Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
Edited by Teresa Fanego and Paula Rodríguez-Puente
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 91] 2019
► pp. 201–234

Chapter 9
The evolution of a legal genre

Rhetorical moves in British patent specifications, 1711 to 1860

| University of Birmingham
| University of Birmingham

This chapter provides a diachronic corpus-based analysis of a vitally important, yet currently very under-researched, legal genre: the patent specification. The empirical focus of the analysis is on changes in the rhetorical move structure of the patent specification genre over the first 150 years of its existence, as represented by a corpus of British patent specification texts ranging from 1711 to 1860. The methodology of the study involves reducing each exemplar text in the corpus to a simple letter code string representing its rhetorical move structure, and then submitting the resulting list of code strings to two kinds of computational analysis: one focusing on the frequency and distribution of individual rhetorical moves over the period of the study, and the other focusing on the frequency and distribution of the different move sequence types attested in the corpus. It is argued that the findings of the study are consistent with, and may thus be interpreted as providing empirical support for, generalized evolutionary theoretical models of genre change.

Keywords: evolution, genre change, move analysis, patent, replication, selection
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Genre analysis
  • 3.Evolutionary perspectives on genre change
  • 4.Data and methods
  • 5.Move type analysis of BLPAS 1711–1860
  • 6.Move sequence analysis of BLPAS 1711–1860
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 6 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91.09gro
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