Statutory Interpretation and Corpus Evidence: Tensions Between Linguistic Reality and Legal Meaning

This paper examines how linguistic meaning interacts with legal interpretation for the statutory term child, focusing on the 2013 Alabama Supreme Court case Ex parte Ankrom. In that case, the court held that child includes unborn individuals under chemical endangerment laws, a decision that raises important questions about how ordinary meaning is established. Using a triangulated, corpus-based framework grounded in linguistic theory, this study analyzes the term child across three corpora representing national, regional, and informal U.S. English. The methodology integrates semantic coding, grammatical context analysis, and lexical alternation to assess whether unborn individuals fall within the prototypical meaning of child in ordinary usage. The findings reveal a strong preference for interpreting child as referring to born individuals, with linguistic evidence supporting its extension to fetuses only in marked contexts. This tension between the court's interpretation and the linguistic evidence highlights the challenges of aligning legal definitions with everyday language use. In emphasizing the role of empirical linguistic data, the study contributes to ongoing debates in legal corpus linguistics around frequency, representativeness, and contextual meaning. Ultimately, this analysis offers insight into how corpus linguistics can support statutory interpretation and reduce interpretive ambiguity without overstepping the boundaries between linguistic and legal expertise.