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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. 2–26

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Eurolect Observatory Project

This chapter presents the research framework of the Eurolect Observatory Project. The starting hypothesis of this research project is that language contact through translation of EU legislation has resulted in the creation and dissemination of standardised lexical variants, structural features and textual patterns in many EU official and working languages. The Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus was compiled to make it possible to describe such features in eleven legislative languages. The corpus enabled the research team to collect evidence of language in use in order to confirm/disconfirm the existence of a macro-variety of legal language – known as Eurolect – generated in the context of the EU legislative multilingual drafting process. A common research template was developed and adopted by all the researchers in their respective chapters, to categorise results obtained from the corpus via a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Keywords: Eurolect, cross-language contact, legislative language, corpus linguistics, language variation patterns
Article outline
  • 1.The research project
  • 2.The EU multilingual setting as a language contact scenario
  • 3.Research goal: Eurolect or not?
  • 4.Research question and methodology
  • 5.The project Research Template
    • 5.1Lexical level
    • 5.2Morphological level
    • 5.3Morphosyntactic and syntactic level
    • 5.4Textual level
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.86.01mor
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