Compiling Literary Academic Word List (LAWL):

A Corpus Analysis of English Papers Published by the HEC Recognized Pakistani Journals

Abstract

The present study aims at compiling a Literary Academic Word List (LAWL) based on the HEC recognized Pakistani journals of English literature published from 2010 to 2019. A corpus consisting 215734 words with 16362 word forms was manually filtered to extract the most frequently used vocabulary items in 40 literature based research papers. The acquired wordlist (LAWL) of 766 words with a high frequency list (HFLAWL) consisting 20 words were chosen for critical analysis and discussion, considering the short and long contexts of the concordance lines and the external sources like key literary works. The results indicated that the selected timeframe was the period of frequent application of literary theories and critical approaches in Pakistani academic and research circles. The findings further stress the need for the compilation of subject specific word lists not only for literature but also for linguistics and other branches of knowledge. Finally, it is hoped that the availability of LAWL is going to be a significant contribution to the general process of learning English and to the specific process of exploring literary vocabulary in a robust manner.