Armonización lingüística y claridad legislativa: una comparación en el nivel sintáctico entre el eurolecto español y el castellano jurídico nacional

The concept of linguistic harmonisation that shapes the translation/co-editing practices of the EU institutions is considered to be a positive factor enhancing clarity in legal texts (cf. Mori, 2018c and 2019b). The Spanish Eurolect has its own peculiarities if compared to national legislative varieties and presents better features as far as simplification and modernisation of legal language are concerned (Blini, 2018a and 2018b). The present study aims to confirm these premises by focusing the intralingual comparison of Eurolect with the national legislative language through a quantitative analysis of syntax. The results show that the Spanish Eurolect is characterised by: shorter sentences; nominalisation, subordination and gerunds used at a lesser extent; preference for SVO order; shallower syntactic trees and shorter dependency relations. This reflects in a lower information load in sentences, thus increasing clarity and accesibility in communication.