Chapter published in:
Observing Eurolects: Corpus analysis of linguistic variation in EU law
Edited by Laura Mori
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 86] 2018
► pp. 200–242

Observing Eurolects

The case of Italian

| Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT
This chapter focuses on linguistic differences in Italian between two legislative corpora belonging to the Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus: corpus A (EU directives) and their Italian laws of implementation (corpus B). In order to prove that two different legislative varieties do exist, corpus-based and corpus-driven analyses involved several levels: lexico-semantic, morphological, morphosyntactic, syntactic and textual. Results obtained through a quantitative approach are combined with qualitative insights and interepreted according to a common categorisation into EU-rooted phenomena, contact-induced features, and intra-linguistic variability (Research Template in Mori (this volume). Significant differences found confirm the existence of an Italian Eurolect characterised by Europeisms on a lexical level, morphological trends, morphosyntactic preferences, and textual patterns that do not conform to language conventions and norms in use in legislative Italian.
Keywords: Italian Eurolect, legislative language, corpus sociolinguistics, linguistic variation, language contact
Published online: 06 December 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.86.09mor
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