Lexical Primings of Licensing Agreements: A Preliminary Investigation

Wei-Chen Chuang

doi:10.5539/ijel.v5n4p1

Abstract

Legal texts such as licensing agreements have achieved a certain degree of notoriety because of their complexity. An analysis of English used in licensing agreements would provide teachers of English for specific purposes (ESP) valuable information for preparing appropriate course materials. Recent theories on the role of a lexicon in language and language acquisition have indicated the importance of the collocational patterns of the key lexicon of an ESP genre (Sinclair, 1991; Hoey, 2005). Based on Hoey's (2005) theory of lexical priming, the current study examined primary lexical priming patterns through identifying the essential key lexical priming patterns of licensing agreements in high-tech industries and exploring their semantic and pragmatic associations. For this study, 60 samples of licensing agreements were randomly selected according to Biber et al. (1990) for determining the linguistic variability required for a sample text to be included in a specialized corpus. The results showed that the lexical primings of the studied keywords substantially converged both semantically and pragmatically. These findings on lexical primings provide an approximate plot illustrating how the semantic and pragmatic associations of the keyword lexical primings combined with the lexical primings constitute the linguistic basics through which the purposes of granting a license are served. Implications for the pedagogical applications of the findings are discussed.

Highlights

A licensing agreement is a “written contract” between the owner/licensor of a patent, copyright, trademark, know-how, service mark, or other intellectual property, and a licensee to use, make, or sell copies of the original” (Black’s Law Dictionary, “Licensing Agreement”)
60 samples of licensing agreements were randomly selected according to Biber et al (1990) for determining the linguistic variability required for a sample text to be included in a specialized corpus
The keyword approach adopted in this study identified several linguistic features of the English used in licensing agreements, thereby validating the keyword approach as appropriate for yielding useful information on the linguistic features of the target genre regarding the lexical priming of the major keywords of the genre

Summary

Introduction

A licensing agreement is a “written contract” between the owner/licensor of a patent, copyright, trademark, know-how, service mark, or other intellectual property, and a licensee to use, make, or sell copies of the original” (Black’s Law Dictionary, “Licensing Agreement”). Because of highly complex nominal expressions, heavy embedding and lengthy texts, legal texts such as licensing agreements have achieved a certain degree of notoriety. The complexities of their lexico-grammatical features affect the reading and understanding of legal texts (Bhatia, 1993). People may require years to sufficiently comprehend this particular genre of English without proper instruction For those whose native languages are not English but who must be engaged in the licensing process, such as legal practitioners, high-ranking executives of high-tech corporations, and executive assistants, legal language renders a complex type of discourse that has been rarely taught at universities the colleges in which they have received their education. To provide relevant language training on the English used in licensing agreements, the essential www.ccsenet.org/ijel

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Conclusion