B38, was J7D

From BNC file J7D:  Iwan Davies, _Sale and supply of goods_, Longman
Group UK Ltd, Harlow, 1990.


This is a complex legal text, extracted from a law textbook,
which contains long quotations from law reports.
As the text stands in BNC, it contains many linguistic oddities.  As with
other texts, a number of these stem from errors in the process of converting
the original document into BNC electronic form, for instance dashes separating
phrases have more than once been omitted and the adjacent words run together
as a single word.  Italics in the original have regularly been ignored.
However, an additional problem in this case is that the textbook itself
distorted some of the language of the law reports it quoted, in some 
cases extremely severely so that what stands in the textbook (and in BNC)
makes no sense at all.  (We have not checked all the original law reports
quoted, but we have checked the long quotations from the _New Law Journal_
and from the _Scots Law Times_.)

It would seem pointless to try to produce annotations for language that
has been garbled as severely as s-unit 00261 has been, as it appears in
the textbook (and consequently also in BNC).  Instead, in addition to
correcting the errors which arose in transcribing the textbook into the
BNC file, we have also corrected the mistakes which arose in copying
quotations from the law reports into the textbook.  With one
exception (where the misquotation involved a suppression of wording which
did not affect the quality of the surrounding English), what appears in the
LUCY text within those quotations which have been checked is not what 
actually appears in the textbook, but rather what ought to have appeared 
if the quotations had been accurate.

This file does not detail each correction made to the BNC version of
the text.  As mentioned above, indications of italicization have been
supplied; where quotations are set as displayed material in the textbook,
this is indicated.  Abbreviations such as "s 72" or "p 194" for
"section 72, page 194" regularly appear as such in the original but
are shown as single words without intervening spaces in BNC; this has
been corrected.  Many changes have been made to the wording from
s-unit 00255 onwards, to adjust wording quoted from law reports to what
actually occurred in the original reports quoted -- in most cases
the misquotations appear to be careless slips which often create
oddities in the English and sometimes reduce it to complete nonsense.
(However, the first such misquotation noticed was the omission of
wording between "suppose" and "that the assignments" at the beginning
of the quotation in s-unit 00255, where the omission leaves the 
surrounding wording making good sense and may have been intentional
although no ellipsis mark occurs in the textbook; in this case, the
BNC text has not been changed to agree with the text in the _New
Law Journal_.)

At the beginning of s-unit 00264, the words "In my opinion counsel"
is followed in the textbook by "for the receiver"; this was probably
inserted intentionally as a clarification of the wording quoted from
_Scots Law Times_, though no square brackets mark it as a deliberate
insertion -- LUCY has deleted these words in conformity with the general
practice in this text of following the original wording of the quotations.

00229  The comma after "CCA 1974" would not occur in good style, because
it separates subject and verb, and occurs at the end of a relative clause
but is not balanced by a comma at the beginning of that clause.

00234  "have been criticised" should be "has ..." after "failure"; this
is the author's confusion, influenced by the immediately preceding
co-ordination.

00241  Again the comma after "Memorandum 25" should not appear.

00241  "have been possible ... to circumvent":  this is an extraordinary
use of "possible"; the word should probably be "able" ("the introduction
of the rule ... would have been able ... to circumvent"), but this is
not a misprint, it is a confusion by the writer in producing a remarkably
convoluted statement.

00242  No comma ought to occur after "moveables", though it would be
quite appropriate immediately _before_ "moveables".

00249  Again the comma after "Ch 1" is redundant as it stands, though
here the most plausible correction would be to add another comma before
that phrase and thus bracket off "Ch 1" as appositional.

00253  Likewise, if there is a comma before "containing substantial 
numbers of such debts", there should be a second one at the end of that 
clause.

00255  The comma after "security" is not permissible, since it splits 
subject from verb and there is no preceding phrase round which it could
be the second half of a balancing comma-pair.

00255  "no evidence whatsoever":  the quoted document uses the shorter
word "whatever".

00272  "Thyseen" -> "Thyssen"
