Anyone reading news reports about Britain over recent months should be familiar with "phone-hacking" (illegally accessing voicemail left on someone's mobile phone). Although the specific crime of phone-hacking is relatively new, being first reported in this paper in 2009, crimes in general, and punishments, have long been the bread and butter of the news media.
Crime (6,215) and crimes (4,156) are certainly high-frequency words in the Guardian Weekly archive. Intriguingly, punishment occurs much less frequently (1,322).
The collective noun crime appears to be subdivided in three ways: by broad classification: war, organised, street, violent, serious, hate, petty; by perpetrator: juvenile, youth and by weapon: gun, knife. Crimes follows a different pattern, strongly collocating with the adjectives: serious, alleged, hate, violent, sex, heinous, political and financial.
Other words associated with crime include: corruption (4,788), corrupt (1,585), criminals (1,396), violations (709 ). Corruption seems to be most frequently alleged, but once it's been established it is then reported as being rampant, government, political, official, widespread, police, endemic. Those who are considered to be corrupt include: officials, politicians, government, police, regimes and officers.
What of the criminals, their victims and the punishment of crime? In this paper war criminals occur most frequently, followed by those who are convicted, organised, common, dangerous, petty, hardened, professional and violent.
Victims fall into three main classes; crime: rape, torture, murder; disaster: aids, flood, quake; or war: holocaust, Nazi, camp, war, bomb. Reporting on the sentence a convicted criminal must suffer focuses on: death, life, prison, jail, suspended and maximum.
Slightly oddly, punishment is most often commented on as being: capital, collective, corporal, unusual, severe, physical, exemplary, harsh, draconian or brutal, but never "well-deserved".
Is this evidence of a liberal dilemma? We are horrified by the impact of crime on its victims, but our consciences are also exercised by the punishments that society inflicts on the perpetrators.
Chris Tribble is a lecturer in applied linguistics at King's College London