National and EU judicial phraseology under the magnifying glass: a corpus-assisted analysis of complex prepositions in Spanish

ABSTRACT

Based on a monolingual comparable corpus made up of judgments delivered by the Spanish Supreme Court and by the Court of Justice of the European Union, this paper presents a case study on complex prepositions considered as a specific discourse feature of these two varieties. In spite of the initial hypothesis, according to which a higher percentage of these phraseological units was expected to be found in national texts, the results of the analysis show that EU judgments contain a higher percentage of complex prepositions, in line with the results obtained by Biel on a number of different legal genres in Polish. From a qualitative perspective, the study also compares similarities and differences in the phraseological patterns used in the two subcorpora, and hints at the untypical use of some units in the EU subcorpus, traditionally considered as traces of ‘translationese’, but functionally interpreted in this study as examples of contact-induced features characterising Spanish Eurolect.

KEYWORDS:

• Judicial phraseology
• JustClar project
• corpus-assisted discourse study
• phrases
• complex prepositions
• Spanish Eurolect

Notes on contributor

Gianluca Pontrandolfo holds a PhD in Translation and Interpreting Studies. He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Trieste (IUSLIT, Department of Legal Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies). His main research interests include legal terminology and phraseology, LSP discourse and genres applied to translation studies, translation training, corpus-assisted discourse studies, sociolinguistics and sociocognitive discourse studies. He is a member of the following international research groups: EDAP group (Studies on Professional Academic Discourse, University of Barcelona); CERLIS (Research Centre on Languages for Specific Purposes, University of Bergamo); CLAVIER (Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Group, University of Modena e Reggio Emilia); CAL² (Interdisciplinary Research Group on Computer Assisted Legal Linguistics) and BIAL (Brussels Institute for Applied Linguistics, VUB University of Brussels).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/c2dab20c-0414-408d-87b5-dd3c6e5dd9a5 (04/06/2019).

2 http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/eu/fight_the_fog_en.pdf (04/06/2019).

3 http://stel.ub.edu/el-servei (26/05/2019).

4 http://clic.ub.edu/en/what-is-clic%3F (26/05/2019).

5 http://www.osservatoriocedu.eu/ (06/06/2019).

6 According to Casares (1992, p. 179) [in Corpas Pastor (1996, p. 88)], phrases “are phraseological units of the system of the language with distinctive features of internal fixedness, unity of meaning and external pansemantic fixedness; in addition, they do not constitute complete statements and, in general, function as sentence elements” (Torner Castells & Bernal Gallen, 2017, p. 78).

7 A distinction is necessary here between ‘complex prepositions’ (locuciones prepositivas) and ‘prepositional phrases’ (sintagmas o construcciones preposicionales) in order to avoid terminological ambiguities (see, among others, Biber et al., 1999, pp. 103–105; Feigenbaum & Kurzon, 2002; O'Dwyer, 2006, pp. 126–127; Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2011, p. 114). The former are grammaticalised combinations of two prepositions with a noun, adjective or adverb in the middle (e.g. by means of, in case of, on account of, with reference to, etc.); they function semantically and syntactically as simple prepositions. The latter are combinations of a preposition and a complement, generally a noun phrase (e.g. because of the situation, during the years, in the morning, in several ways, on the night, etc.). The term multi-word prepositions (Vestergaard, 1977, pp. 5–6) has also been found as synonym for ‘complex prepositions’.

8 The normalised frequency is obtained in the following way: raw frequency/total tokens * 1,000.

9 http://nlp.lsi.upc.edu/freeling/index.php/node/1 (11/11/2019).

10 The author wishes to thank Dr. Montserrat Nofre (STeL, Servei de Tecnologia Lingüística, University of Barcelona) for her precious and constant assistance in the collection and quantitative analysis of data.

11 Starting from an internal list available in the suite, FreeLing is able to recognise multiword units – and graphically connect them with an underscore (_), see Appendix – and then lemmatise and treat them as simple prepositions. The results obtained from FreeLing were later cross-checked with lists of multiword units compiled by the STeL centre at the University of Barcelona.

12 The importance of complex prepositions in legal language is also confirmed by the European Observatory Research Template (Mori, 2018a, p. 19), in which ‘complex prepositions for legal mapping’ are one of the morphosyntactic features of intra-linguistic variability tested across languages (in particular, they have been found in EU English, Finnish, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish (Mori, 2018c, p. 382)).

13 https://dle.rae.es/?id=HxFMc9Z (04/06/2019).

14 The translation is the official English version of the judgment available on the CJEU website (https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/index.html) (05/06/2019).

15 See the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas (http://lema.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?key=interior).

16 An additional confirmation of the use of the complex preposition has been found in COSPE (Pontrandolfo, 2016, pp. 77–85) and in particular in the Spanish component of the corpus (CospES: 271 judgments, 2,019,566 tokens) containing original criminal judgments delivered by Spanish judicial bodies.