General English Words in English Legal Discourse
慎一郎 鳥飼, シンイチロウ トリカイ, Shinichiro Torikai · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2014
Legal English is not only full of so called legalese but a surprisingly large number of general English words, those we use in our everyday communication.However, the way they are used in this context is quite different from that in daily use.This gap between general use and legal use causes great confusion among Japanese learners of Anglo-American law.In order to help Japanese learners I compiled, with my colleague, four legal corpora with more than one million words each as a basis for a production oriented legal English dictionary.I extracted 71 very common and basic English words and investigated how they are used in legal discourse.In this paper, I take the verb hold as an example and explain thoroughly its collocation, senses, and lexico-grammatical patterns when used in legal discourse.I also show a sample of how this verb should be described in our legal English dictionary.