Abstract
The Tariff Act of 1930, which is also known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, enacted during the Great Depression, has had profound impacts on US trade. This paper analyses collocation patterns in the act to aid legal provision interpretation. Using a corpus-based textual analysis approach, it identifies main collocation patterns such as noun-noun, verb-noun, and adjective-noun collocations. These patterns express legal concepts and legislative intent, and play crucial roles in resolving ambiguities, revealing legislative intent, maintaining consistency in interpretation, and assisting judicial precedents and legal arguments. Research found that the most frequently used noun is "customs" and noun-noun collocation is "customs duties", the verb "impose" and verb-noun collocation "impose tax/duty/fee/penalty". The paper also provides case studies to illustrate the prac-tical applications of collocation analysis in legal interpretation. By bridging corpus linguistics and legal hermeneutics, this research offers new methodologies for legal interpretation and enriches the understanding of legal language characteristics. However, limitations such as the relatively small corpus size are acknowledged, and future research directions are proposed.
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How to cite this paper
On the Collocation Patterns of Words in the Tariff Act of 1930 and Its Role in the Interpretation of Legal Provisions
How to cite this paper: Mei Wen. (2025) On the Collocation Patterns of Words in the Tariff Act of 1930 and Its Role in the Interpretation of Legal Provisions. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 9(6), 1130-1136.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.06.014