Discourse-organising lexical bundles in academic law textbooks: a corpus-based analysis

Abstract

Despite extensive research on the selection of lexical bundles for learning purposes in a wide range of academic disciplines, written legal discourse remains relatively underexplored. This large-scale, corpus-based study aims to address this gap by providing law students, practitioners, and material developers with a data-driven inventory of text-organising lexical bundles. Drawing on written data from a corpus of law-focused textbooks, this study identifies a 144-item list of lexical bundles performing discourse-organising functions. Parameters such as length, frequency, range, and pedagogical utility are used to identify and filter bundles that serve as discourse organisers. The findings reveal that 90% of the discourse organisers identified in the list are structurally preposition- and noun-based, while verb-based bundles and other fragments constitute the remaining 10%. The study also reveals that the list of discourse organisers is dominated by bundles that perform three key subfunctions: creating a frame for arguments, presenting results, and introducing a topic. Other less frequently occurring sub-functions are also identified. By utilising corpus analysis and linguistic descriptions of patterns, this list will help international students and early-career legal practitioners meet the lexical demands of law study and training in English-medium institutions.