Collocations of Sex and Gender in Legal and General Corpora
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Summary/Abstract: The present study attempts to contribute to the research of collocations in both general and specialized language. Thus, it fits into Trajectory 1 of research in corpus-based studies in legal language carried out by Biel (2010) that explores how legal language differs from general language or other languages for special purposes. Specifically, it aims at looking at variation in candidate collocations of the two selected terms, i.e. sex and gender, as extracted from a general corpus and a legal one. We investigated the senses the items carry in the specialized and general corpora, the overlap of candidate collocates, and their ranks in frequency lists generated for each corpus. The findings suggest that the two terms in question display considerable differences in their collocational profiles and their combinatory potential. We offer an explanation for the observed significant variations in the way the collocations are represented and conclude that the type and nature of corpora affect the collocational profile of a lexical item. We also discuss the implications this may have for conducting research into terminology or lexicography and for devising resources for language learning and teaching.

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