earticle

영어

This study examines keyword lexical bundles—widely distributed and legally significant multi-word expressions—across four maritime legal genres: Case Law, Legal Documents, Legislation, and Academic Legal Articles. Using a text dispersion-based approach, it effectively isolates domain-specific bundles, addressing the limitations of traditional frequency-based methods, which often overlook widely dispersed yet legally critical expressions. Findings reveal that academic keyword lexical bundles are most prevalent in Legislation and Academic Legal Articles, contributing to conceptual clarity and structured legal argumentation, while technical keyword lexical bundles are evenly distributed across Case Law, Legal Documents, and contracts, ensuring contractual precision and regulatory consistency. By classifying these bundles using the Maritime Academic Word List and the Maritime Technical Word List, this study identifies distinct syntactic and functional patterns, distinguishing referential, organizational, and stance functions. These findings contribute to ESP education, legal drafting, and maritime legal analysis, fostering linguistic accuracy, consistency, and clarityin maritime legal communication and regulatory frameworks.