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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.1603-1623
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 11 Sep 2025 Revised 18 Nov 2025 Accepted 09 Dec 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202512.1603

Semantic Prosody of Lexical Bundles in Maritime Legal English Texts

Guandong Zhang ; Yaochen Deng ; Hyun-Jong Hahm ; Se-Eun Jhang
(First author) PhD Student, Department of English Language and Literature Korea Maritime & Ocean University 727, Taejong-ro, Yeongdo-Gu, Busan 49112, Republic of Korea guandong_z@163.com
(Second author) Professor, The School of English Studies Dalian University of Foreign Languages 6 West Section, South Lushun Road, Dalian 116044, Liaoning, China deng_yaochen@163.com
(Third author) Associate Professor, Department of English and Applied Linguistics University of Guam Mangilao, Guam 96923, USA hhahm@triton.uog.edu
(Corresponding author) Professor, Department of English Language and Literature Korea Maritime & Ocean University jhang@kmou.ac.kr


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study examines the semantic prosody of lexical bundles in Maritime Legal English texts, a subset of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) that requires precise and discipline-specific expression. The research focuses on provide, cause, and effect, analyzing their evaluative meanings across Case Law, Document, Legislation, and Academic genres using the Maritime Legal English Corpus. Text dispersion-based keyword analysis and a keyword lexical bundle framework are used to compare semantic prosody of these words with general English patterns from the BNC Baby corpus. The findings reveal distinct differences between general English and Maritime Legal English, as well as those among the four genres. Provide and effect show positive or neutral prosody, while cause predominantly displays negative prosody. These insights enhance the understanding of evaluative meaning in legal discourse and carry important implications for ESP pedagogy, legal language instruction, and corpus-based research by highlighting genre-specific encoding of evaluative meaning.

Keywords:

semantic prosody, lexical bundles, text dispersion-based keyword analysis, Maritime Legal English, genre analysis

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