Description
A Master of Arts thesis in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) by Reem Kamal Rabea entitled, “The Building Blocks of Business Contracts’ Recitals: A Corpus-Induced Approach to Assessing Homogeneity”, submitted in December 2022. Thesis advisor is Dr. Philip McCarthy. Soft copy is available (Thesis, Completion Certificate, Approval Signatures, and AUS Archives Consent Form).
Abstract
By following a bottom-up approach based on principles of induction, the current study aims to provide the most typical lexical units of the provisional element of recitals in business contracts. In doing so, a novel methodological approach to corpus homogeneity is proposed to satisfy quality standards of the corpora serving the purpose of this study. Cosine values were utilized for homogeneity operationalization since they operate on the principle of similarity. Further, in producing the frequency wordlists, the study focuses on two methodological parameters, namely N-gram sequence length and frequency, which are proposed by Biber and Conard (2005). By means of a textual analysis tool named Gramulator (McCarthy et al., 2012), the N-grams common to two specialized corpora of several contract types were extracted. A preliminary frequency baseline (< 50%) was employed in the selection process. More notably, the statistical examination of the data suggests the presence of a parent-child relationship between both corpora. The findings of the current study are of interest to English for legal purposes (ELP) practitioners who are precisely teaching new law students as well as researchers that wish to investigate the discourse functions forming the conventions of business contracts drafting.