[15.1] An earlier chapter (chapter 6) established the importance of the text in statutory interpretation. The present chapter examines how particular presumptive meanings may be derived from the particular words in doubt. The primary meanings are the ‘literal’, ‘grammatical’, ‘natural’ and ‘ordinary’ meanings. Often combined, the presumptive meaning that reading a provision generates may be described, for instance, as the ‘ordinary and grammatical meaning’ and the ‘natural and ordinary meaning’.

In Chapter 6, I argue that the terms ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ have been used interchangeably in the previous literature on the representation of mental illness in the press. Specifically, I argue that using these two terms interchangeably (especially during data collection) may result in incomparable datasets. Through linguistic analysis, I show that the terms ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental health’ are distinct terms, and that the meaning of the two terms has shifted over the time period covered by the MI 1984–2014 Corpus. I argue that the lexical change I observed is consistent with pragmatic accounts of language change in which the language development is in part a result of euphemism (e.g. Traugott & Dasher, 2002).