Tasks in Corpus Linguistics

© J. Sinclair 2002

A few years ago, there was a legal dispute in England about the meaning of the word visa. The plaintiff had Indian nationality, and had been in UK as a student. He returned to India for his father’s funeral, but got a "return visa" before he left in order to ensure the continuation of his studies. When he returned he was refused readmission into UK, and when he presented his visa he was told that a visa was not a permit. All it certified was that the immigration authorities had seen his papers.

His lawyers argued that the normal meaning and use of the word visa in current English was that it was a permit to enter a country. They turned to The Bank of English for support of this argument. This was potentially a dangerous argument because it could set a precedent; the normal position of the law is that if a word has a legal meaning then that must be the meaning that is applied, regardless of everyday usage. If the evidence of corpora were to be admitted, this protection system could collapse.

Using the datafile visa1, prepare a short statement about the way in which visa is normally used. Check with the file visacolls, which is a list of collocates of visa arranged according to their significance as measured by their t-score.

[There is a bank card called "Visa" in world-wide use; instances of this have been removed from the examples and collocations.]