Contrastive analysis of ECJ judgments and EU directives ‘in the light of’ lexical bundles

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge in the research on formulaicity in different discourses and different genres. Formulaicity, which includes different types of formulaic language, such as phrasal verbs, idioms, phrases, collocations, and lexical bundles (Biber et al., 1999), has also been noted as one of the characteristic features of legal language (Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2011; Jablonkai, 2010; Breeze, 2013; Biel, 2017). The present paper focuses on lexical bundles, which are considered “recurrent discourse building blocks” (Biber et al., 1999). Based on a corpus-driven and formulaic approach, this paper aims to identify and compare the prevailing 4-word lexical bundles in two genres of legal texts, namely court judgments of the European Court of Justice and directives of the European Union, with the focus on their structural characteristics. In addition, the present study seeks to find out the shared lexical bundles between the two genres and investigate possible translation patterns that might be used to render these bundles from English into Lithuanian. For the purpose of this study, two 1-million-word comparable corpora of court judgments and directives were compiled. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the selected lexical bundles uncovered a number of differences between the use and possible translation equivalents of lexical bundles in the two genres of the legal texts.