The use of semi-technical vocabulary to understand the epistemology of a disciplinary field

•Semi-technical vocabulary analysis enabled insights into disciplinary epistemology.•The analysis focussed on shared rhetorical functions in post-graduate legal writing.•Key points of reference for legal analysis were identified through ‘that’ and ‘of’.•Norms for the expression of student stance were identified through ‘that’.•The prevalence of ‘or’ highlighted the importance of inclusion/exclusion in law.

Explaining to university students how discourses are constructed within their disciplinary field is a challenge faced by many language tutors. The task is made even more difficult by the fact that many fields of study are composed of several quite disparate disciplines, and that the tutor may not have any formal qualifications in the field in question. To gain an insight into the core tenets of a disciplinary field's epistemology, this study built a semi-technical word list; the list was based on a corpus of just under one million words for post-graduate legal writing and comprised terms which were shared between the various legal disciplines present in the corpus. An analysis of the word list's concordance lines revealed the type of discourse functions common to these disciplines. The types of functions shared enabled the students to do the following: i) to refer to source texts in various ways (e.g. through different kinds of reporting verbs) and for different rhetorical reasons, ii) to set parameters for the application of a law and iii) to convey different types of authorial evaluation (criticality, evidence, impersonality). These findings have implications for both tutors and students as it is necessary for them to understand the discourse norms for the epistemology of a disciplinary field.