The Legal Māori Corpus

Purpose

The Legal Māori Corpus (LMC) has been designed and compiled to provide evidence of the use of Māori terms for Western legal concepts. It was designed as a large lexicographic corpus (approximately 8 million words of legal Māori texts) to provide information to underpin the writing of entries for the Legal Māori Dictionary.

The Legal Māori Corpus is essentially complete as of 30 June 2010. The texts in the corpus that were printed before 1910 are publicly available. These are the texts that are now clear of Crown copyright. The remaining texts that can be cleared of copyright and confidentiality restrictions will be made available by the end of this phase of the project.

It should be noted that the LMC Pre-1910 Corpus collection is not identical to the contents available in the Legal Māori Archive. The set of texts in the two repositories does not match completely. In addition, the LMC Pre-1910 Corpus collection is presented in plain text (.txt) files so that researchers are easily able to download the corpus and more easily search the whole collection or parts of it for their own purposes.

Researchers seeking to identify and understand the charateristics of Māori language vocabulary and terminology will find the LMC most useful while those wishing to research the historical texts for other types of research may wish instead to access the Archive