Author Date

2025-11-05

Degree Name

BA

Department

Linguistics

College

Humanities

Defense Date

2025-11-05

Publication Date

2025-12-09

First Faculty Advisor

Dr. Brett Hashimoto

First Faculty Reader

David Armond

Honors Coordinator

Dr. Holly Baker

Keywords

shell nouns, corpus of legal contracts, legalese, plain language, vagueness

Abstract

The forms and functions of shell nouns (SN), semantically abstract nouns that can package and characterize complex segments of discourse, have been documented in academic discourse and L2 English writing (e.g., Aktas & Cortes, 2008; Benitez-Castro & Thompson, 2015). The abstract nature of SNs lends itself to use where vague language might be favored to allow for a variety of contingencies (Benitez-Castro, 2015). Thus, SNs have also been found to be present in legal language where some of these functions are desirable (Ren et al., 2019). The present study examines the use of SNs in a corpus of 2,700 US legal contracts (53+ million words), spanning 54 contract types. SNs were iteratively identified via lists of shell nouns compiled from previous studies on the syntactic frames that mark their use. Once identified, concordances containing shell nouns were randomly subsampled and categorized according to their use using multi-coded thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2017). This work contributes to the understanding of vagueness in legal language, potentially informing both jurists and linguists about the meanings, functions, and interpretation of SNs in contract law.

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