Interpreting Phraseological Units in Contracts: The Case of Extended Term–Embedding Collocation
Interpreting Phraseological Units in Contracts: The Case of Extended Term–Embedding Collocation

Summary/Abstract: Extended units of meaning (Sinclair 2004) have been scarcely investigated thus far in legal phraseology with the exception of research into lexical bundles (Goźdź–Roszkowski 2006, 2011; Kopaczyk 2013; Breeze 2013; Tománkóva 2016; Biel 2017). This paper is therefore an attempt to show that the Sinclairian wider–context–perspective may prove to be especially useful for the study of phraseological units in legal genre since it helps us to reveal their collocational framework, allowing both grammatical and phraseological patterns to emerge. The paper focuses on extended ‘term–embedding collocations’ (Biel 2014b) extracted from the English and Croatian comparable corpora of contracts by means of WordsmithTools 6.0 (Scott 2012). It highlights some of the most striking examples supporting the above hypothesis and it accounts for their interpretation by means of analysing the extralinguistic context of phraseological units in contracts. It may be suggested that this study represents an attempt to fill a gap in research on legal phraseology due to the fact that private legal documents tend to be largely underrepresented in this specialized phraseology. It may also be suggested that by focusing on extended units of meaning in legal Croatian the paper attempts to fill yet another gap in corpus–based studies of legal language, which tend to be largely Anglocentric. Finally, the paper may, apart from revealing the stability of legal phrasemes, also represent a useful resource for translator training since it offers the wider context of a term or an expression in contract language.

• Details
• Contents