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Article published In: Register and Professional Discourse
Edited by Shelley Staples and Gavin Brookes
[Register Studies 7:1] 2025
► pp. 11–41

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A register approach to specialized word list creation

Using keywords to supplement the Contracts Word List

ORCiD logo with link | Northern Arizona University
 | Brigham Young University
 | Brigham Young University
 | Northern Arizona University
 | Northern Arizona University
Published online: 2 May 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.25004.lar
Abstract
Specialized word lists (SWLs) can help language learners acquire domain-specific vocabulary; however, there are few such lists for legal domains despite the growing demand for resources in this area. Additionally, in list design and construction, register is rarely considered a meaningful component of design or validation despite the fact that register is one of the most meaningful predictors of linguistic variation, including lexical variation. The present study begins to fill these gaps by expanding on the Contracts Word List (Hanks, E., Hashimoto, B., & Egbert, J. (2024). The contract word list: Integral vocabulary for reading and writing English contracts. English for Specific Purposes, 751, 37–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) in creating subregister specific lists for 54 types of contracts (CWL+). SWLs within the Contracts Word List were generated relying heavily on text-dispersion keyness analysis (Egbert, J., & Biber, D. (2019). Incorporating text dispersion into keyword analyses. Corpora, 14(1), 77–104. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), and their usefulness was validated through percent coverage statistics and register analysis. This study illustrates the usefulness of keyness analysis in word list creation and the constructive role that register can play in the design and evaluation of SWLs.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Contracts
    • 2.2Word lists
    • 2.3Register and the contracts word list
    • 2.4Keyness analysis
  • 3.The present study
  • 4.Methods
    • 4.1The corpus
    • 4.2Word list generation
    • 4.3Word list validation
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Word lists
    • 5.2Validation
    • 5.3Situational analysis
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Percent coverage
    • 6.2Situational analysis
      • 6.2.1Variation in word lists across subregisters
      • 6.2.2Patterns in word lists across subregisters
  • 7.Conclusion
    • 7.1Implications
    • 7.2Limitations and future directions
  • Notes
  • References
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