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

Chapter 4
Observing Eurolects

The case of English

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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.English legislative drafting in the EU and the UK
    • 2.1EU drafting principles
    • 2.2The transposition of EU directives in the UK
    • 2.3Data and methodology
  • 3.Lexical level
    • 3.1EU-rooted phenomena
    • 3.2Loanwords and calques
    • 3.3Intralinguistic variability
  • 4.Morphology and syntax
    • 4.1Verb morphology
    • 4.2Syntactic patterns
  • 5.Textuality
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.86.04san
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