The Specialized Vocabulary of Modern Patent Language: Semantic Associations in Patent Lexis

The Specialized Vocabulary of Modern Patent Language: Semantic Associations in Patent Lexis  Darren Hsin-hung Lin a and Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh b Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan City 701, Taiwan, R.O.C. g364375@ms49.hinet.net a, shelley@mail.ncku.edu.tw b Abstract. This paper presents an analysis of the language of patents, as a contribution to the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). While there work appears to fill a niche in the ESP field (and particularly in the English for Occupational Legal Purposes), the present study insists that statistical approach is necessary for compiling patent technical word list for ESP. Since research studies on word associations of patent lexis have been relatively scarce, this paper reports the technique to select appropriate words from high frequency words is required for modern patent language. The research content and statistical investigations building up a patent technical word list which helps learners of modern patent language expand the vocabulary size for a better understanding of patent writing. Keywords: English for Specific Purposes, intellectual property rights, corpus linguistics, lexical semantics, patent  The authors would like to thank Dr. Wen-Gin Yang, National Taiwan Normal University, and Dr. Pi-Ching Chen, National Cheng Kung University, for commenting on the previous version of this work. Comments from the reviewers are also highly appreciated. The research herein is supported partly by NCKU (international research grant; project number CR99002). Copyright 2010 by Darren Hsin-hung Lin and Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh 1 Introduction In the knowledge economy age, the intellectual property rights (IPR) become the important assets to human beings. Especially to the knowledge industry, the IPR is the key measure of a company competing with others. The area of IPR includes patent law, copyright law, trademark law and trade secret law, together with some aspects of other branches of the law, such as licensing and unfair competition (American Bar Association, 2010). Besides, intellectual property lawyers are required interdisciplinary knowledge as new development in law generate needs for lawyers with specific backgrounds—patent law, technology law, business law, and economy law. The fact that even when the global markets have been affected by economic recession in the end of 2007, the demand for intellectual property lawyers remains unusually high (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2009) is worth mentioning. As long as novel inventions were created, there is a need for intellectual property law to be enforced to protect human rights and their invisible property for specific purposes. As globalization has resulted in greater economic growth rapidly, inevitably the challenges of interdisciplinary communication that concerned with intellectual property and other significant sector encounters has increased. This recognition of the importance has brought intellectual property to the limelight. Resulting from such recognition, the recent emphasis that has been placed on using English as the lingua franca to apply patents on an international level and the PACLIC 24 Proceedings 417 application of technical vocabulary for the writing of professional patents becomes an essential issue in applied linguistic research. 2 English for …

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