Academic Word List in Pakistani Legal Discourse

Abstract

This corpus-based study aims at exploring the most frequently-used academic words in
legal discourse and compares the wordlist to the distribution of high frequency words in
Coxhead‟s Academic Word List (AWL) in order to examine their coverage within the law
corpus. This study is an attempt to develop an academic word list of frequently used linguistic
items and explore the contextual use of words in legal discourse. For this research, a corpus of 76
law research articles, consisting of approximately 246,426 words from 3 law sub-disciplines
(Corporate Law, Pakistan Tax Decision and All Pakistan Legal) were compiled and analyzed
based on two criteria; frequency and range. Based on the analysis, a list consisting of 72
academic word families were produced to provide a useful law academic word list. A word to be
included in the list must occur at least 50 times in the corpus. This study concluded that attempts
must be made to create discipline-specific word lists. Further pedagogical implications are
discussed in detail.