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.