The Development of an ESP Law Dictionary Based on the US Constitutional Cases : Suggestions for ESP Education in Japan

本研究讨论了与半技术词汇教学相关的问题，提出了分析这些术语的工具和技术，并提供了分析如何帮助特定用途英语（ESP）应用的例子。作为一个例子，我们使用了美国宪法案例语料库中的法律的词汇，分析了词汇的意义、语法特征、搭配模式和频繁出现的特定语篇特征。本研究的理论基础是应用语言学和语料库语言学，这两门学科目前正被用于编写通用英日词典。法律词典提供了法律的技术词汇的定义及其历史背景，但不幸的是缺乏这些法律的词汇应如何在上下文中使用的例子。此外，对于一般意义的词语如何在法律的文件中与法律的意义一起使用，也没有解释。这对非英语母语的法律学生来说可能是一个问题，导致他们在理解用英语写的案件时遇到困难，因为他们经常不能完全理解半技术性的法律的词语的含义。另一方面，高度技术性的术语往往更容易掌握。本研究提出了一种方法，以确定在一般和特定的情况下，以及找到共同的搭配特定领域的语料库中使用的单词的差异。该项目为开发有效的教学材料奠定了基础，开发的模式可以适用于其他语言领域的特定/特殊用途。

This research discusses issues related to the teaching of semi-technical vocabulary, present tools and techniques for analyzing such terms, and offers examples of how the analyses can aid applications in English for Specific Purposes (ESP). As an example, we use legal vocabulary from a corpus of US Constitutional Cases from the United States which was analyzed for word meanings, grammatical features, collocational patterns and frequently occurring specific discoursal features. The theoretical foundations of this research lie in applied linguistics and corpus linguistics, which are currently being used to prepare general English-Japanese dictionaries. Law dictionaries offer definitions of legal technical words and their historical backgrounds, but unfortunately lack examples of how these legal words should be used in context. Furthermore, there are no explanations as to how words with general senses are used with legal senses in legal documents.This can be a problem for non-native English-speaking law students, leading to difficulties in comprehending cases written in English because they frequently cannot fully understand the meaning of semi-technical legal words. The highly technical terms, on the other hand, tend to be easier to master. This research project presents an approach to identifying differences in the usage of words in general and specific contexts as well as to find collocations common to field-specific corpora. This project lays the basis for developing effective teaching materials, and the model developed can be applicable to other fields of language for specific/special purposes.