In this paper Frank Knowles suggests some ways to study the empirical detail of lexical patterning in texts written for specific purposes. In the particular case of the article the texts researched are written in English and connected with financial journalism. The author brings up the notion of the Discourse Community, acquiring and exercising the power to establish a satisfactory and professionally controlled mode of discourse. To the problem of how to acquire the language of a DC (an issue of high relevance to translators and interpreters) there is now a new solution, viz. concordancing software, which gives rapid access to lexical instantiations. A brief account is given of how one initial research and development exercise, involving the CD-ROM version of the Financial Times and Le Monde, can create word-maps for lexical items, develop methods for mapping multi-word units common in English SLP texts and analyse the problem of collocability.