Keyness in maritime institutional law texts

This study describes some characteristics of maritime institutional legal texts in terms of corpus methodology. We self-built two study corpora: a public maritime institutional corpus and a private maritime institutional corpus. The differences between the two corpora can be distinguished by identifying typical linguistic features from the keyness aspects of key words, key clusters, and key semantic domains. Specific words and phrases in complementary distribution are offered to distinguish public maritime legal characteristics from private maritime legal characteristics by comparing the self-built specialized corpora with the more general British National Corpus (BNC informative genre). Linguistic features are discussed from the view of keyness, thus enabling non-legal practitioners as well as non-specialist readers to discover and describe underlying parameters that best depict the differences between legal registers or genres.