Mana Aha? Exploring the Use of Mana in the Legal Māori Corpus

Abstract

The Legal Māori Corpus (LMC) is one of several major outputs of the Legal Māori Project, and provides the core evidence for the compilation of the Legal Māori Dictionary, due to be completed in 2012. To our knowledge it is the largest publicly available corpus of te reo Māori. The LMC is comprised of 8 million words of running text, compiled from printed legal texts in te reo Māori spanning from the 1820s to the current day. The pre-1910 text collection (5.2 million words) from the LMC is now publicly available on the Victoria University of Wellington Law Faculty website. Those remaining texts (1.8 million words printed from 1910 onwards) that are able to be cleared of copyright and confidentiality restrictions will be released in 2012. This paper briefly outlines the context of the Legal Māori Project, describes the compilation and structure of the LMC, and then focuses in detail on the use of the word mana in the corpus. It identifies the common collocations and phrases that contain mana, and looks at their distribution over time.