Measuring the degree of specialisation of sub-technical legal terms through corpus comparison

One of the most remarkable features of the legal English lexicon is the use of sub-technical vocabulary, that is, words frequently shared by the general and specialised fields which either retain a legal meaning in general English or acquire a specialised one in the legal context. As testing has shown, almost 50% of the terms extracted from BLaRC, an 8.85m word legal corpus, were found amongst the most frequent 2,000 word families of West’s (1953) GSL, Coxhead’s (2000) AWL or the BNC (2007), hence the relevance of this type of vocabulary in this English variety. Owing to their peculiar statistical behaviour in both contexts, it is particularly problematic to identify them and measure their termhood based on such parameters as their frequency or distribution in the general and specialised environments. This research proposes a novel termhood measuring method intended to objectively quantify this lexical phenomenon through the application of Williams’ (2001) lexical network model, which incorporates contextual information to compute the level of specialisation of sub-technical terms.