Chapter published in:
Observing Eurolects: Corpus analysis of linguistic variation in EU lawEdited by Laura Mori
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 86] 2018
► pp. 48–62
Observing Eurolects
The case of Netherlandic Dutch
Gert De Sutter | Ghent University
Fee De Bock | Ghent University
Building on the textual data in the Dutch part of Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus, consisting of 660 texts (3.7M words) in corpus A (directives) and 504 texts (4M tokens) in corpus B (implementation laws), we investigate the extent to which the language of European directives shines through in (Netherlandic) Dutch national law. In order to do so, we extracted several EU-rooted phenomena, contact-induced features, and intralinguistic variants and analyzed the distribution of these features by means of bivariate and multivariate statistics, so as to discern meaningful patterns in the data. The results enable us to determine whether Dutch implementation law exhibits linguistic traces of the so-called Eurolect. The results show similarities between national law implementations and EU directives as well as differences. One of the most striking patterns that emerge across different language domains (lexicon, morphosyntax, discourse) is that implementation laws contain much more formal linguistic features, thereby ignoring clear writing recommendations.
Keywords: Eurolect, Netherlandic Dutch, formality, coherence marking, correspondence regression
Published online: 06 December 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.86.03des
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.86.03des
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