Analyzing Lexical Bundles in Legal Discourse: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Court Judgments

Abstract

Lexical bundles are multi-word frequently or repeatedly used in legal writing. These are the units
or building blocks of the language in formal text intended to communicate ideas effectively and
efficiently. These multi-words contribute in legal conversation and discourse to maintain flow,
cohesion, and coherence in legal texts, especially court judgments. Therefore, the present
research study explores the use of lexical bundles along with their discourse functions in court
judgments. A specialized corpus of the court judgments was built to study the lexical bundles,
including their functions, using AntConc software 4.3.1. The study employed Biber et al.'s
(2004) functional taxonomies of lexical bundles for the identification and categorization of
lexical bundles. After identifying the lexical bundles, they were categorized according to their
discourse functions. The present study analyzed the top 100 lexical bundles obtained through the
corpus of court judgments. The study found that referential expressions were frequently used in
functional categories compared to stance expressions and discourse organizers. The findings of
this research study highlight the significance of the lexical bundles used in legal discourse to
create stance, coherence, and cohesion in court judgment.