The dictionaries consulted by the majority contained two potentially relevant definitions: one of them is essentially “shot”, which can easily be understood as shot by shot. But the other is “to empty the load” or “to unload”. This definition would tend to support Rasa`s position that he committed only one crime, since he emptied the weapon only once when he fired the bullets. As mentioned earlier, lexicographers began to use “big data” to draw conclusions about both what definitions should say and the relative prevalence of different meanings of a word in everyday language. Judges and lawyers are used to searching large information banks for relevant cases of the meaning of a word. This process characterizes the method of the case in general. The novelty is the possibility of searching electronic corpora for use cases of words. Over the past two decades, large corpora of general American English have been made available to the public as a research tool. The most important were developed by language researchers at Brigham Young University. Two well-known examples of their corpora are the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), with its 520 million words from five text genres from 1990 to 2015, and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), which consists of 400 million words from popular written genres such as magazines, fiction, non-fiction and news publications from 1810 to 2000.

In these corpora, each gender is balanced decade by decade to “monitor” a representative sample of actual language use over time [7], making it the largest systematically collected corpus of American English. The popular meaning of the term “obligation” is a duty to do or not to do something. In the legal sense, obligation is a civil law term. An obligation may be established voluntarily, such as an obligation arising from a contract, a quasi-contract, a unilateral promise. An obligation can also be created unintentionally, such as a tort obligation or a law (for example, California Uniform Interstate Family Support Act). An obligation binds two or more specific persons. Therefore, the legal meaning of an obligation refers not only to a duty, but also to a correlative right – one party has an obligation, which means that another party has a correlative right. The natural or legal person responsible for the obligation shall be referred to as the debtor; The natural or legal person who has the corresponding right to an obligation is called a creditor. The most common way to determine the ordinary meaning of a word is to rely on language skills as a native speaker.

We all do this in our daily lives, and we do it so regularly that we don`t even notice it. In addition, we all have an idea of when a person used a word or phrase in a particular way. Linguists also rely on their intuitions about grammar and meaning to create theories about the structure and functioning of language. We first comment on this method, then turn to the use of dictionaries by the courts, and finally discuss the recent shift to corpora by linguists and legal analysts as a tool to determine how words are generally understood. Linguists have not been as quick to rely on dictionaries as authoritative sources, although linguists are often involved in compiling dictionaries. Definitions often differ from dictionary to dictionary. The differences stem from the fact that editors have different guidelines on the number of words included, the types of words included, the number of meanings each word should contain, how to share closely related meanings, how to organize the different meanings, and how best to illustrate those meanings. Some dictionaries also require lexicographers to use a vocabulary list when writing definitions, which can affect the nuances of meaning compared to the definitions of other dictionaries. Although publishers set guidelines for such lexicographic decisions, many of these decisions have been left to individual lexicographers.

Oxford Dictionaries makes this statement: Traditionally, linguists have used their own judgments about meaning and acceptance to make generalizations about the structure of language. Just as important as what you can say or say is what you can`t say or mean. For example, linguists have observed (see, for example, Freidin 2012) that of the four sentences presented below, the first three are grammatical sentences of English, but the fourth is not: in this article, we first tried to show that there is no agreed method for determining the “ordinary meaning” of a legal term for the purposes of legal interpretation.