Jesse Egbert, assistant professor of applied linguistics, stands in his office at Northern Arizona University / Kaitlan Olson/ Arizona Daily Sun
Word goes back to use by Founding Fathers
By Kaitlan Olson | Arizona Daily Sun
In the ongoing emoluments lawsuit regarding foreign payments made to President Donald Trump through his Washington, D.C. hotel, NAU’s Jesse Egbert and Georgia State University’s Clark Cunningham submitted data not in support of either side, but in the interest of language.
The two professors are linguists who use corpora (collections of authentic, recorded language) to determine patterns of word use and grammar.
Last month, they submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court detailing their findings on the word “emolument,” the archaic term that has even Constitutional experts stumped in District of Columbia v. Trump.
Enter the linguist experts with a surprising solution — time travel.
Although directly asking the nation’s founders to define the word is impossible, there are other ways to gain answers from the long-gone individuals, like through corpus linguistics.
