LEXICAL BUNDLES IN LEGAL TEXTS CORPORA – SELECTION, CLASSIFICATION AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Veronika Tománková

doi:10.5817/DI2016-2-75

LEXICAL BUNDLES IN LEGAL TEXTS CORPORA – SELECTION, CLASSIFICATION AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Vol.9,No.2(2016)

Veronika Tománková

https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2016-2-75

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Abstract

This paper analyzes lexical bundles with the aim of determining specific features of the linguistic competence of the selected research population and drawing some pedagogical implications from the fi ndings. The study focuses on lexical bundles retrieved from four legal genre-based corpora (Flowerdew 2005) compiled from texts submitted by respondents who are all legal professionals. In an eff ort to provide a more comprehensive view of lexical bundles, the phenomenon has been treated using both the conventional register analysis approach (Biber & Conrad 2009) and an approach adopted especially for legal texts by Breeze (2013). The study also attempts to submit proposals for the teaching of lexical bundles (O’Keeff e et al. 2007: 216) in the context of reading comprehension. Within the context of needs analysis, this study has been conducted as part of a larger study aiming to examine communicative competence of legal professionals from the four language skills perspective.

Keywords:
legal English; legal English communicative competence (LECC); lexical bundle (LB); structural classifi cation of a LB; functional classifi cation of a LB; frequency analysis; content; LB; non-content LB

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