Lexical bundles across four legal genres

Abstract

Legal language is often said to be formulaic, but little research is available on the nature of frequently occurring sequences of words in different legal genres. This article investigates the lexical bundles found in four legal corpora: academic law, case law, legislation, and documents. Major differences are brought to light between the type of bundles that are found, and the roles they have in the text. Academic legal writing uses relatively little formulaic language. Case law uses noun phrase bundles relating to agents, documents and actions, as well as many extended prepositional phrases. Legislation and documents contain many noun phrase bundles, and verb phrase bundles with a deontic or referential function. The function of these different types of bundle as parts of a schematic frame or as slot-fillers is discussed.

Hard or Soft Science? Conceptualizing Educational Technology through a Lexical Bundle Analytical Approach

“…Noun phrases and prepositional phrases are two essential elements constructing the building blocks of these lexical bundles. This result is in line with the findings of previous studies that whatever the disciplines, noun phrases and prepositional phrases are favorable structural units abounding in academic wiring (Breeze, 2013;Hyland, 2008b). Further exploration into the prevailing structural categories across disciplines suggests that the bundle structure of passive + prepositional phrase fragment is not frequently used in educational technology but makes a striking feature in electrical engineering and biology.…”

“…To be recognized as lexical bundles, they must meet two key criteria: (a) frequency: the number of bundles occurring in a text; (b) range: the distribution of bundles in a number of text. The frequency can be set differently, varying from 10 to 50 times per million words (Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2004;Breeze, 2013;Grabowski, 2015;Hyland, 2008a;Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010). The most extensively adopted frequency is 20 times per million words (e.g., Biber et al, 1999;Cortes, 2004;Jalali, Rasekh, & Rizi, 2008;Liu, 2012;Wei & Lei, 2011).…”

“…The disciplines examined cover a wide range of long-established disciplines, including applied linguistics (Hyland, 2008b;Jalali et al, 2008), law (Breeze, 2013), history (Cortes, 2004), business studies (Hyland, 2008b), physics (Alipour, & Zarea, 2013), computer engineering (Alipour & Zarea, 2013), electrical engineering (Chen & Xiao, 2015;Hyland, 2008b), biology (Cortes, 2004;Hyland, 2008b), pharmacy (Grabowski, 2015), and medicine (Jalali, Moini, & Arani, 2015). These disciplines fall into either hard science (e.g., electrical engineering, physics, biology, and medicine) or soft science (e.g., applied linguistics, politics, and business studies), which is a rigid dichotomy.…”

A corpus-driven analysis of structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments in English and their translation into Lithuanian

“…So far, there have been several noteworthy studies contributing to the investigation of lexical bundles in legal discourse, namely, works by Goźdź-Roszkowski (2006b), Jablonkai (2010, Kopaczyk (2013) and Breeze (2013). The studies approach lexical bundles from different perspectives: synchronic (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2006b), variation in legal discourse (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011;Breeze 2013) and standardisation of early legal discourse (Kopaczyk 2013) (Goźdź-Roszkowski & Pontrandolfo 2015, 133-134).…”

“…Besides academic discourse, the lexical bundles approach has been also used to study political (Partington & Morley 2004), religious (Shrefler 2011), literary (Stubbs & Barth 2003), medical (Kopaczyk 2013;Grabowski 2013), and legal (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2004, 2006a, 2006bJablonkai 2009Jablonkai , 2010Breeze 2013;Kopaczyk 2012Kopaczyk , 2013Tománková 2016) discourse. However, a much greater deal of previous research has been concerned with lexical bundles in academic discourse than in any other discourse.…”