Language & Law and the Ordinary Meaning of "Child": How Corpus Linguistics Would Have Decided Ankrom v. Alabama

Determining the meaning of a word in a statute remains debated in language and law. Corpus linguistics (CL) has seen a rise in interest in US statutory interpretation in the last decade, with the first legal decision involving CL being made in 2011 (Vogel et al. 2018). Thus, CL has shown to be a useful tool to provide insights into statutory interpretation. Within this tradition I analyse the criminal case of Ankrom v. Alabama, in which the defendant was found guilty of chemically endangering her child during pregnancy by taking controlled substances (2013). In sentencing the court construed that “child” also means “unborn child”. Following criticism of this decision (Angelotta & Appelbaum 2017) I consider what the ordinary meaning of “child” is and hence contribute to the research and literature on statutory interpretation using CL. 

I argue that the ordinary meaning of “child” can be established via relevant corpora (COCA, CANT, CAT), two of which were created for this analysis. First, I conduct an analysis of semantic patterns applying the methodology of Goldfarb (2017). This is a context-dependent approach to mapping meaning patterns (ibid.). Second, in a double dissociation analysis (Solan & Gales 2017) I show which other terms could have been expected in place of “child” and further disambiguate its usage. Additionally, I comment on the potential subjectivity introduced by the researcher in these kinds of analyses (Nyarko & Sanga 2020). Based on the results I argue that this is a valuable combination of approaches to solve meaning disputes in statutory interpretation. 




Case 
Ankrom v. Alabama, 152 So. 3d 397 (2013) 

References 
Angelotta, C., & Appelbaum, P. S. (2017). Criminal Charges for Child Harm from Substance Use in Pregnancy. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 45(2), 193–203. 
Goldfarb, N. (2017). A Lawyer’s Introduction to Meaning in the Framework of Corpus Linguistics. BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, 2017(6), 1359–1416. 
Nyarko, J., & Sanga, S. (2020). A Statistical Test for Legal Interpretation: Theory and Applications. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3737292 
Solan, L. M., & Gales, T. (2017). Corpus Linguistics as a Tool in Legal Interpretation. Brigham Young University Law Review, 2017(6), 1311–1358. 
Vogel, F., Hamann, H., & Gauer, I. (2018). Computer-Assisted Legal Linguistics: Corpus Analysis as a New Tool for Legal Studies. Law & Social Inquiry, 43(04), 1340–1363.