Designing, compiling and profiling the Corpus of Arts and Humanities Academic Texts (CAHAT): A new resource for English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is broadly concerned with the use of English to perform academic tasks. Many corpus studies, though, have shown that the language used to perform academic tasks varies widely across the disciplines. Accordingly, EAP has come to be viewed as a continuum, with English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) at one end and English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) at the other. There is ever-growing interest in disciplinary corpus research in EAP, or ESAP research, but corpora to support it remain limited in availability and/or size. This paper therefore describes the development of a large and available ESAP corpus and then introduces it as the Corpus of Arts and Humanities Academic Texts (CAHAT). This c.25-million token (word) corpus of 288 PhD theses collected from three UK universities is organised into six disciplinary subcorpora and enriched with detailed text-external and text-internal metadata. The CAHAT is available on request for non-commercial ESAP research and pedagogy. The full corpus is available through Sketch Engine, while a miniature version of the corpus (c. 6.5 million tokens) is available via a free, purpose-made, user-friendly concordancing tool. The paper concludes by proposing potential applications of the CAHAT in ESAP research and pedagogy.