Abstract
This study presents the Written Academic Legal Vocabulary (WALV), a discipline-specific genre-focused list of keywords in a corpus of academic legal texts. To generate this list, a purpose-customized corpus of full-length academic texts is created and analyzed with the help of corpus-based analytical tools. Items on the list are chosen based on criteria such as frequency of occurrence, range and keyness. The keywords recur more frequently in a specialized corpus than in a general reference corpus, a finding that attests to the pedagogical utility of these expressions as possible focus of explicit instruction. The final list consists of 298 headwords and 219 families (lemmas). Findings also indicate that the list includes words belonging to different grammatical types, the most common of which are nouns. The list also incorporates a large number of abbreviations, shortenings and acronyms.
Highlights
Legal language requires that learners, those for whom English is a second or foreign language, exhibit a greater understanding of and familiarity with a wide range of specialized vocabulary
Items on the list will be compared against similar items in three academic lists, namely the Academic Word list (AWL), the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL)
The total occurrences of the headwords amount to 1,322,789 million times, accounting for 13.9% of all tokens in the corpus. Such percentage is greater than Coxhead’s (2000) estimate which reported that items on the Academic Word List covered 10 % of all tokens in her 3-million corpus of academic materials. This discrepancy may be due to differences in the components of each corpus, as the present study draws on texts specific to law and legal studies whereas Coxhead’s corpus comprises texts of distinct academic areas
Summary
Legal language requires that learners, those for whom English is a second or foreign language, exhibit a greater understanding of and familiarity with a wide range of specialized vocabulary. One way to support learners’ lexical knowledge is to draw their attention to key lexical items typical of a specific discipline (e.g., Coxhead, 2000; West, 1953) Were these lists received with appreciation, but they made their way into second language pedagogy: textbooks, methodology manuals and teaching resources. The study of legal language has attracted the attention of several researchers (Berman, 2013; Bhatia, 1987; Maley, 1994; Tiersma, 2000; Williams, 2004). In a much register-focused study, Williams (2004) explores the characteristics of written legal English, concluding that the specialized nature of vocabulary represents a challenge for non-experts as it contains several archaic expressions (e.g., hereinafter and darraign) and words of Latin and French origin (e.g., attainder and profits à prendre).
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