Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Organization Logo Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Research Project

Historical Semantics and Legal Interpretation

Project Team:

2015 – 2018

Project Summary

Researchers developed new computational tools and methodologies at the intersection of linguistics and law to study law within the framework of lexical shifts over time.

Research Team

Alison L. LaCroix

Alison L. LaCroix

Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law, Associate Member of the Department of History

University of Chicago

Alison LaCroix is a scholar of US legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal thought. She is currently writing a book on US constitutional discourse between 1815 and 1861, for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the...

Jason Merchant

Jason Merchant

Lorna P. Straus Professor, Department of Linguistics and the College

University of Chicago

Dr. Jason Merchant's primary research area is syntax and its interfaces with morphology and with semantics. Much of his work has concentrated on elliptical phenomena, and in exploring the kinds of ontological questions that ellipsis requires answers to: how there can be meaning without form,...

Project Narrative

Explore

Featured Project

Emotion Construction Without a Sense of the Body
Explore

Continue Exploring

The Body’s Role in Thinking, Performing, and Referencing
Explore