Chapter published in:
Observing Eurolects: Corpus analysis of linguistic variation in EU law
Edited by Laura Mori
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 86] 2018
► pp. 64–92

Observing Eurolects

The case of English

| Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT
The English text of any EU act is the product of collaboration between native and non-native drafters and is influenced by contact with the other EU languages in the multilingual drafting process. This study investigates the main differences between the language used in a corpus of EU directives (corpus A) and the language employed in the related UK national transposition measures (corpus B), via a mixture of quantitative data obtained using specific concordancing software (WordSmith Tools) and qualitative observations. The significant differences found at various levels (lexical, morpho-syntactic and textual) confirm the existence of a specific variety of English used in EU legislation, that is, an English Eurolect.
Keywords: English Eurolect, EU directives, transposition, UK legislation, corpora
Published online: 06 December 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.86.04san
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