Investigating “concgrams” in the language of contracts and legal agreements

Abstract

Extended units of meaning have been scarcely investigated thus far in legal phraseology. Moreover, dictionaries of law neglect to include extended versions of prototypical binary units. For instance, nominal consideration is included in the English-Croatian Dictionary of Law (Ga?i? 2010) but its wider context transferred at nil or nominal consideration is not listed. This paper will therefore contrastively investigate extended phraseological units in the language of contracts. The analysis will involve comparing specialized corpora with special purpose (LSP) dictionaries and with reference corpora. The paper proposes that by analysing the extended units of meaning found in contracts and legal agreements one can gain a clearer insight into the natural idiomaticity and formulaicity prevalent in this genre. By comparing the extended units of meaning found in English and Croatian corpora, one can reveal examples of usage of such units with all their associations. The results of such analysis can be applied to translator training, especially where translation is carried out into a second language (L2).