RECURRENT WORD COMBINATIONS IN JUDICIAL ARGUMENTATION. A CORPUS- BASED STUDY. [pre-print version] Published as “Recurrent Word Combinations In Judicial Argumentation. A Corpus-Based Study”, In: Langue, Droit, Société. Language,Law,Society (D. Bartol, A.Duszak, H.Izdebski, J-M.Pierrel (eds).Nancy, 2006.139-152. Stanislaw Goźdź-Roszkowski, University of Lodz, Poland 1. Introduction Despite the relatively long tradition in linguistics of studying frequently used word combinations, there are not many studies devoted to word combinations in specialised language, and particularly in legal language. The existing research tends to concentrate on terminological phrases, i.e. combinations of lexical units with a term as the essential part. The type of phrase which has been usually described comprises nouns as terminological nucleus and accompanying verbs, for example: to generate electricity, to accept a bill of exchange (see Kjaer 1990 for an overview of various methods of describing phraseology in language for specific purposes). Indeed, lexical combinatorics in sublanguage texts is generally viewed in terms of syntagmatic co-occurrence involving two lexemes and possibly determiners, quantifiers or prepositions, where at least ”one component of the collocation must be a term for which a conceptual description is (or at least may be) available)” (Heid 2001:788). The central proposition of this study is that the above-mentioned approach is of limited use for the purpose of comprehensive description of collocational phenomena in the language of specialist communication. The present paper offers a different, frequency-driven, corpus-based approach to multi- word combinations, referred to as ‘lexical bundles’. The purpose of the study is to investigate the grammatical features and the use of recurrent word combinations in the legal genre of judgements. The research questions can be formulated as follows: (1) what are the word combinations characteristic of this specific type of text; (2) what are the grammatical characteristics of these word combinations; (3) how can these word combinations be related to particular discourse functions. 2. Studies of lexical bundles A bewildering number of terms can be found in the relevant literature to refer to recurrent word combinations: ‘lexical bundles’, ‘clusters’, ‘multi-word units’, ‘multi-word lexical items’, ‘repetitive phrases’, ‘idioms’, ‘cliches’, etc. Of those, lexical bundles, multi-word units and clusters are used to refer to computationally derived groups of words where each word is found to have a particular statistical relationship (often frequency of co-occurrence) with other words in the group. As already hinted, the approach adopted here is based on the principle of frequency of co-occurrence and I follow Biber et al (1999) in using the term ‘lexical bundle’. Lexical bundle is defined in the following way: Lexical bundles are recurrent expressions, regardless of their idiomaticity, and regardless of their structural status. That is, lexical bundles are simply sequences of word forms that commonly go together in natural discourse (Biber et al. 1999: 990)