Keywords in Written Academic Legal Texts: A Corpus-Derived List | Alasmary | International Journal of English Linguistics | CCSE

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.