Lexical Bundles in Contract Law Texts: A Corpus-Based Exploration and Implications for Legal Education

Abstract

This paper reports on a study which explores lexical bundles in Contract Law, a key subdivision of the legal discourse. Based on a corpus of full-length texts, a total of 117 patterns are retrieved, refined and further subjected to structural as well as functional analyses. The results show that text authors make use of a wide range of lexical bundles, most of which are structurally phrasal and functionally research-oriented. Text-structuring sequences and participant-oriented bundles appear in the corpus, but are comparably far less employed. Also, the analysis of data established the domain-specific nature of patterns which revolve around the concept of contract. This paper concludes by discussing these findings and their implications for language learning, teaching and the ESP/EAP pedagogy.

A lexico-grammatical comparison of statutory law and popular written language

“…Previous linguistic descriptions of written legal language have concerned a variety of registers including decisions, directives, regulations, law journals, commercial law documents, case law, contracts, law reports, and legislation. Linguistic studies of these registers have most commonly focused on lexis: in particular, lexical bundles and keyword analysis (Caliendo et al 2005;Trebits 2009;Jablonkai 2010;Breeze 2013;Biel 2017;Alasmary 2019;Serachini 2020), phraseology (Biel 2009(Biel , 2014Pontrandolfo 2015) and on single features such as modals (Foley 2002;Andersson 2007;Gibova 2011) and personal pronouns (Rodríguez-Puente 2019).…”