How relevant are Latin wordforms and clusters in legal English?a corpus-based study on the representativeness and specificity of such elements in UKSCC: an "ad hoc" legal corpus

Abstract

The use of Latin wordforms and phrases in legal English is one of the features that contribute to its high degree of complexity. Most text and academic books on this ESP variety describe their use from a prescriptive perspective often based on a limited number of linguistic samples, however, to the best of our knowledge, no corpus-based studies on Latin words and phrases have been carried out to the date. Therefore, this article approaches the issue employing a corpus-based methodology aiming to establish the degree of representativeness of these elements as well as to classify them into different levels of specialization. Likewise, it also explores the different results obtained before and after discriminating single-word Latin units from two/three-word clusters. In order to complete such tasks, an ad hoc 2.5 million-word legal corpus, UKSCC, has been compiled according to corpus standards and employed as the source to obtain the data for this study.