The construction and application of the legal corpus

With the development of Teaching Chinese as an International Language and the professionalization trend of Chinese learning, legal Chinese becomes more and more important. To support the legal Chinese teaching and provide Chinese learners, Chinese teachers and other legal workers with authentic data, this paper constructs a legal corpus, which contains 35 legal texts of Mainland China. This study automatically segments the texts into words and manually checks all the segmentation results. Besides, through using the quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, this paper analyzes the common vocabulary of legal Chinese, analyzes the features of legal Chinese, compares the differences between the common vocabulary of legal Chinese and that of the international Chinese teaching, and compares the differences of the common meaning between legal Chinese words and common words in international Chinese vocabulary syllabus. This study also makes reference to the classification of Chinese word level in The Syllabus of Chinese Vocabulary and Characters Levels [18] to classify the words in the legal corpus and explores the application of this corpus in international Chinese teaching. This study finds that there are many differences between legal Chinese and general Chinese, in terms of the common vocabulary and the common meaning of words. So, it can be seen that the legal vocabulary has particularity in the teaching. We cannot directly utilize the existing vocabulary teaching methods to the teaching of legal Chinese vocabulary. Therefore, this paper puts forward several solutions for solving this problem. Copyright © 2018 Springer International Publishing AG.