A dictionary of legal English collocations as an aid for mastering the legal English genre

Katarzyna Mroczyńska

doi:10.31743/lingbaw.11836

Abstract

The article begins with a brief overview of collocations and their features as being central to legal language and, as such, worth studying, especially in view of the fact that legal language studies tend to be mostly interested in terminology rather than phraseology. To bridge this gap, the article offers a tool for legal English learners, i.e. the dictionary of legal English collocations based on judgments of the UK Supreme Court. Our dictionary project is aimed at analysing the corpus we created, using Sketch Engine software, a cutting-edge lexicographic tool which enables the uploading and exploration of users’ own corpora. The project will focus on analysing bipartite legal English collocations appearing in the corpus. The next stage of the project will be the preparation of the final product of our research, i.e. a dictionary of legal English collocations. We believe that such a dictionary will prove a useful aid for mastering the conceptual structure of legal English.

Highlights

In this article, we intend to present our ongoing project which involves compiling a dictionary of legal English collocations
This article opens with a brief summary of research findings regarding collocations, where we advocate the need for mastering collocations in order to become a proficient user of legal English
Based our observations as academic teachers working with students of Business English, including elements of legal English, we notice that students often lack sufficient exposure to phraseology which forms part and parcel of the language and they frequently struggle to find appropriate collocations in a given context

Summary

Introduction

We intend to present our ongoing project which involves compiling a dictionary of legal English collocations. In an attempt to remedy this situation at least partly, we offer a tool for legal English learners, i.e. a dictionary of legal collocations based on judgements of the UK Supreme Court published in the period from 2009 to 2018. As legal language studies appear to concentrate mostly on terminology rather than phraseology, we would like to try and bridge this gap. To this end, the project will focus on analysing bipartite legal English collocations appearing in the corpus with the dictionary of legal English collocations, which we hope will have some pedagogic applications, to follow as the final stage of the project. Given that professional discourses such as law include a large number of formulaic expressions, multiword units and collocations, the lexical items to be presented in the dictionary will be worth integrating into a teaching curriculum so that students are exposed to these patterns, explicitly to enhance their learning outcomes

Collocation explained – definitions and competing approaches

Conclusions