Litvishko O.M. Structural Peculiarities of Bigram-Collocations in Legal English

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2019.2.4

Ol'ga M. Litvishko

Candidate of Sciences (Politics), Associate Professor, Department of English and Professional Communication, Pyatigorsk State University

Prosp. Kirova, 63, 357500 Pyatigorsk, Russia

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https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8430-8501

Abstract. The article describes the results of research on detecting structural peculiarities of thematically-stipulated two-component set expression in legal English texts. The material under study included texts of conventions of International Labour Organization. Special attention is paid to thematic bigrams-collocations and the systematic character of their usage. Two types of bigrams are identified in the conventions: contact and distant ones. Structural peculiarities are discovered by calculating their grammatical references to notional and functional classes of words. The bigramic character is presented in the following models of combinability: notional with another notional word, notional with a function word, function with a notional word. Some ways of translating bigram-collocations into Russian are also mentioned. The potential of statistical analysis is considered as a mean to find the most frequent collocations; having analyzed one text of convention (the fragment is included into the article) the author presented a database of 200 bigram-collocations. The results of this research could be used in automatic text processing and text generating programs in the sphere of law, international employment and labour law including; more than that, they might encourage further research of structural-and-semantic features of bigrams-collocations according to the type of semantic relations between their elements, and define the most often used models of bigrams in the texts used in the sphere of international law, including terminological bigrams as units of legal terminology system.

Key words: bigram, collocation, contextual combinatorial characteristics, document, international convention, labour law, legal English, English.

Citation. Litvishko O.M. Structural Peculiarities of Bigram-Collocations in Legal English. Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriya 2. Yazykoznanie [Science Journal of Volgograd State University. Linguistics], 2019, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 37-47. (in Russian). DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2019.2.4

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