Language and the Law in the European Union

GIUDITTA CALIENDO
Language and the Law in the European Union
Language and the Law in the European Union
Aspects of communication within the European Union institutions have, from the outset, represented a
fertile domain of investigation in the field of language analysis and specialised discourse. The
multilingual regime on which supranational communication is founded gives rise to an interesting
scenario, where linguistic and translation issues are directly involved in the expression of multicultural
variety. The technical nature of EU legal language has led scholars to rank it among the category of
specialised languages, as it is characterised by specific patterns and mechanisms that regulate its
morpho-syntactic and lexical evolution.
The study on EU legal discourse is introduced in Chapter 1, which provides a broad overview of
the historical and political reasons underlying the current multilingual regime adopted by the European
Union institutions. The analysis illustrates the current linguistic situation (following the 2004
enlargement to Mediterranean and Central and Eastern European Countries) as well as the institutional
instruments used to guarantee an effective and sustainable multilingual system. Translation into all the
official languages of the Union is ensured by the linguistic services of the European institutions, in
particular by the Directorate General for Translation of the European Commission, which is
unparalleled in terms of size and in-house staff. This opening section culminates in the analysis of the
complexities generated by the rigid drafting process of EU multilingual legal texts which, although
translated rather than co-drafted, are considered equally binding and vested with the same legal force.
Reference is also made to cases of linguistic discrepancy that emerged in the past between different
language versions, as well as to the arbitration role played by the European Court of Justice in ensuring
a uniform interpretation of EU law throughout national courts.
The quantitative investigation of EU documents implies a corpus-based research analysis, which
is made possible through a work of document collection and selection. This results in a final corpus,
EUSLEX (European Union Secondary Legislation), consisting of EU secondary legislation enacted by
the Council of the European Union, autonomously or jointly with the European Parliament, over a
time-span of almost 4 years: from 1st July 1999 until 31st December 2002. The texts, in English and
1
Italian, are drawn from the EUR-Lex website1, which represents the official and complete database
collection of EU legal texts. The corpus, introduced and described in Chapter 2, consists of almost four
million words and is distributed as follows:
Text types
Tokens
English section
Italian section
1.270.877
1.241.824
Decisions
385.480
378.960
Directives
831.381
822.162
Framework Decisions
37.166
35.521
Regulations
Table 1. Corpus composition per number of words
The corpus was used to investigate EU legal language in all its morphosyntactic, stylistic and lexical
aspects. It also proved an indispensable tool of investigation for both the quantitative and qualitative
analysis of modal verbs employed in the different text types constituting EU secondary legislation. The
corpus was searched and its occurrences and concordances investigated with the support of the
WordSmith Tools software (Scott 2004). A useful instrument in the comparison of statistical data was also
represented by the British National Corpus, a collection of 98 million words of written texts and two
million words of spoken language (Leech et al. 2001). At a second stage, thanks to the contribution of
the SSLiMIT, the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the
University of Bologna at Forlì, the texts in the EUSLEX corpus were annotated. This involved
lemmatisation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging and a categorisation in terms of genre, year and language
for each document. These tasks were carried out using supervised machine learning techniques. The
EUSLEX corpus is now available online on the SSLiMIT website2 and can be searched for research
purposes together with other corpora made available by the SSLiMIT.
In Chapter 3, the research work is approached with the intent of investigating the various features
of EU legal language in order to assess its degree of specificity and demonstrate that, being a specialised
language, it responds to specific rules and patterns that regulate its organisation. The analysis is
therefore carried out on a multidimensional scale, taking into consideration aspects related to morphosyntax, style and lexicon. The approach adopted is interpretative in nature, and not merely limited to
description and quantitative analysis. To this end, the discussion shows to what extent some of the
1
Available at: http://www.europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/search/index.html
2
http://sslmitdev-online.sslmit.unibo.it/login.php
2
linguistic aspects shared with other specialised languages (e.g. general legal language) are employed in
EU texts to achieve disciplinary goals whilst accommodating the message of Community law to the
diverse national legal settings. The closing part of this chapter focuses on EU specific lexis, in an
attempt to categorise the various mechanisms of lexical innovation that generate EU terminology in
order to ‘label’, through neologisms, innovative types of institutions, measures and policies.
The focus of the attention is shifted in Chapter 4 from the general distinctive traits of EU
secondary legislation to the specific legal acts that constitute it: Directives, Framework Decisions,
Regulations and Decisions. These provisions differ in terms of their applicability (while Regulations and
Decisions are directly applicable, Directives and Framework Decisions need implementation
procedures by Member States) and final addressees (e.g. Regulations are generally addressed to all
Member States, while Decisions can be binding only on specific individuals or Member States). The
investigation therefore seeks to identify the communicative function performed by modal verbs in
conveying the different pragmatic purposes of the four legislative text types. Starting from a
quantitative analysis of the occurrence, distribution and use of modal forms in the documents of the
corpus, the study explores the pragmatics of prescriptive and performative verbs used to express
different levels of obligation in EU law. The ultimate aim is to identify different nuances in the legal
messages of different text types, depending whether the obligation arises as prescriptive or explicitly
performative.
From a general overview of the main aspects under investigation, a set of patterns in EU legal
discourse can be identified in the expression of its communicative and regulatory purposes. The main
objective of the research work thus culminates in delimiting a specialist framework in which EU legal
language creates, and simultaneously expresses, a sui generis system, neutralised from any nationally
based culture or legal tradition.
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