Question

In recent decades, several legal theorists have championed corpus linguistics—the quantitative analysis of historical digital text repositories—as an objective method for determining the original public meaning of constitutional provisions. Proponents contend that this empirical technique strips statutory construction of judicial bias by transforming semantic debates into quantifiable statistical inquiries. While this methodology undeniably introduces a welcome degree of empirical rigor to a field historically dominated by subjective intuitions, its proponents frequently overstate its determinative power. Language in historical corpora is invariably skewed by the social, political, and material conditions of publication, meaning that raw frequency of usage rarely maps neatly onto accepted normative legal meaning. Furthermore, linguistic frequency cannot resolve syntactic ambiguities where historical speakers themselves held conflicting interpretations. Thus, while corpus linguistics remains a valuable diagnostic aid capable of disconfirming improbable readings, it cannot serve as a self-sufficient oracle of constitutional interpretation.

The author's attitude toward the use of corpus linguistics in constitutional interpretation can best be described as which of the following?