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Technical Language in Post-Graduate Academic Legal Writing

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Technical Language in Post-Graduate Academic Legal Writing The Rhetorical Functions of Semi- technical Language in Post-graduate Academic Legal Writing by Paschal Daniel Gerard Maher Student Number: 0770272 A dissertation submitted for the degree of Ph.D. by research University of Limerick Supervisors: Dr Fiona Farr & Prof Michael McCarthy Submitted to the University of Limerick, January 2013 Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................. i Declaration ....................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... iii List of Tables .................................................................................................................. iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................... vii List of Charts ...................................................................................................................x List of Appendices .......................................................................................................... xi List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................... xii Glossary ..........................................................................................................................xvi Chapter 1 –Introduction .................................................................................................1 1.1 Aim of the Thesis ......................................................................................................1 1.2 Discourse Community ...............................................................................................2 1.2.1 Communities of practice and discourse communities .....................................2 1.3 English for Academic Legal Purposes (EALP) and English for Occupational Legal Purposes (EOLP) .............................................................5 1.3.1 The divisions of legal discourse .....................................................................5 1.3.2 Characterising EALP .....................................................................................8 1.3.3 The transition from EALP to EOLP ............................................................. 10 1.3.1 Summary comments ..................................................................................... 11 1.4 Approaches to text analysis ...................................................................................... 11 1.4.1 Summary comments ..................................................................................... 16 1.5 Research context ...................................................................................................... 17 1.5.1 Research questions ...................................................................................... 20 1.6 Thesis outline .......................................................................................................... 20 Chapter 2 Academic Writing ......................................................................................... 23 2.1 Student participation in the discourse community ................................................... 23 2.2 Genre ...................................................................................................................... 25 2.2.1 Academic genres ........................................................................................... 25 2.3 General Linguistic Features of Academic Writing ................................................... 30 2.4 Student Academic Writing ...................................................................................... 36 2.4.1 The writing challenges students face ............................................................ 37 2.4.2 Student writing development ........................................................................ 39 2.5 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 41 Chapter 3 Legal English ................................................................................................ 43 3.1 The Nature of Legal English ................................................................................... 43 3.2 The Origins of Legal English .................................................................................. 45 3.3 Features of Legal English: Lexical, Syntactic and Discourse ................................... 50 3.3.1 Lexical features ........................................................................................... 51 3.3.2 Syntactic features ......................................................................................... 53 3.3.3 Discourse features ....................................................................................... 56 3.3.4 Summary comments ..................................................................................... 58 3.4 Legal English Genres .............................................................................................. 58 3.4.1 EALP genres ................................................................................................ 60 3.4.2 EOLP genres ............................................................................................... 64 3.4.3 Sources of law ............................................................................................. 67 3.5 EALP and Student Challenges ................................................................................ 74 3.6 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 75 Chapter 4 Data Collection and Methodology ................................................................ 78 4.1 Corpus-based Research Approaches to Writing ....................................................... 78 4.1.1 Corpus analysis approaches ........................................................................ 82 4.1.2 Longitudinal corpora ................................................................................... 84 4.1.3 Criteria for collection .................................................................................. 86 4.1.4 Small and specialised corpora ..................................................................... 87 4.2 Semi-technical Language ........................................................................................ 89 4.2.1 Identification process for semi-technical language ....................................... 89 4.2.2 Building on single word units ....................................................................... 90 4.3 Data Collection and Organisation in the Present Study ............................................ 91 4.3.1 Process of data collection and breakdown according to university ............... 91 4.3.2 Participant details ....................................................................................... 93 4.3.3 Representativeness of data ........................................................................... 93 4.3.4 Organisation of the data: Modules covered in the LLM courses ................... 94 4.3.5 Organisation of the data: Period categories ................................................ 96 4.4 Data Analysis in the Present Study .......................................................................... 98 4.4.1 Parameters for identification of semi-technical language for the whole corpus ..................................................................... 98 4.4.2 Procedure for identification of semi-technical language in study corpus ........................................................................... 101 4.4.3 Delimitations for inclusion/exclusion of semi-technical terms .................................................................................. 102 4.4.4 Period analysis: Why do a period analysis? ............................................... 105 4.4.5 Building the period sub-corpora ................................................................ 106 4.4.6 Period semi-technical language ................................................................. 106 Chapter 5 The Use of ‘Or’ ........................................................................................... 111 5.1 Literature Review ................................................................................................. 111 5.1.1 The phenomenon of binomial and multinomial constructions ..................... 111 5.1.2 Semantic and syntactic features of binomial and multinomial forms ............ 114 5.1.3 Semantic relations: Synonymy .................................................................... 115 5.1.4 Semantic relations: Antonymy .................................................................... 118 5.1.5 Semantic relations: Hyponymy ................................................................... 123 5.2 Data Analysis ........................................................................................................ 126 5.2.1 Syntactic features ....................................................................................... 129 5.2.2 Source ....................................................................................................... 138 5.2.3 Rhetorical functions ..................................................................................
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