Fun legal language page

English for Academic Purposes (EAP)

1. Vocabulary: basic COCA / BNC searches

2. Morphology: *ality, d?s*al, others?

3. Syntax: Biber charts (p 114, 127, 158, 239, etc)

4. Semantics: chair, chain, [signal].[v*] // [nn*]

Coxhead: Academic Word List (2000)

• Built on top of top 2000 "word families" (West: General Service List, 1950s)

• 3.5 million word corpus

• Four main sections: arts, commerce, law, science; 28 sub-sections

• At least 100 tokens; at least 10 (25?) in each section; once in 15/28 sub-sections

• 570 word families (2011 / SQL: "awl by families" (2nd part))

• Coverage: about 10% of their academic corpus; 8.5% of another corpus; 1.4 fiction (Proj Gutenberg)

• Implementation: should be integrated into other materials (but usually not)

• Future work: spoken academic? (e.g. MICASE)

Our approach

• Not built on top 2000 word families, but there is a bit of "bridge" vocabulary (function words, etc)

• 120 million word corpus (85m academic + 35m "soft" academic (espec. business))

• Nine main sections: education, humanities, socsci, history, phil/rel/psych, sci/tech, law, medicine, business (missing anything?)

• Criteria: 1.5 PERC, .8 dispersion, .2 disp = 7/9, n/v/j/r, no genre > 3x expected (2011: /files/awl2.xlsx)

• Any number of lemmas

• Coverage: about 20% (2011: /files/families1.xlsx)

• Dee Gardner PPT (blue, yellow, red) (diagram)

• Tied in to www.wordandphrase.info

Try www.wordandphrase.info

• Families

• Genres

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