Abstract
The subject of this paper is the context analysis in legislation as a part of the linguistic methods of interpretation of the law. Meeting the requirements of clarity and unambiguity of the statutory law is possible only when the authors and the addressees interpret normative text similarly.
Corpus linguistics offers several tools that allow legislators to analyse empirically the linguistic contexts in a large volume of texts, both general and special, using computational technologies. The first part of this paper contains the definition of the term "context" and the meaning of context analysis as a prerequisite for meeting requirements of the government's legislative rules.
Attention is paid to the descriptive nature of the norms of general language and to the fact that knowledge of all contexts of a word is a necessary precondition for its correct use in a legislative text. The second part discusses the limitations of traditional methods of context analysis, such as a native speaker intuition, a use of dictionaries and thesauri, and a full-text search in legal information systems.
The last third part presents available general and specialised corpora and corpus methods of context analysis. The limitations of these methods and the preconditions for their proper use in law are also enumerated.