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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. 200–242

Chapter 9
Observing Eurolects

The case of Italian

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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: From EU legal Italian to Italian in domestic law
  • 2.Italian as a Eurolect: Background and research methodology
  • 3.Lexical analysis
    • 3.1EU-rooted lexical features
    • 3.2Contact-induced lexical phenomena
    • 3.3Register and intra-genre lexical variability
  • 4.Lexical morphology
  • 5.Verb morphology
  • 6.Morphosyntax
  • 7.Syntax
    • 7.1EU-rooted syntactical phenomena
    • 7.2Contact-induced syntactical features
    • 7.3Intra-linguistic syntactical variability
  • 8.Textual dimension
    • 8.1EU-rooted textual phenomena
    • 8.2Contact-induced features and intra-linguistic variability at the textual level
  • 9.Concluding remarks and future developments
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.86.09mor
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