Observing Eurolects: The case of Italian

This chapter focuses on linguistic differences in Italian between two legislative corpora belonging to the Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus: corpus A (EU directives) and their Italian laws of implementation (corpus B). In order to prove that two different legislative varieties do exist, corpus-based and corpus-driven analyses involved several levels: lexico-semantic, morphological, morphosyntactic, syntactic and textual. Results obtained through a quantitative approach are combined with qualitative insights and interepreted according to a common categorisation into EU-rooted phenomena, contact-induced features, and intra-linguistic variability (Research Template in Mori (this volume). Significant differences found confirm the existence of an Italian Eurolect characterised by Europeisms on a lexical level, morphological trends, morphosyntactic preferences, and textual patterns that do not conform to language conventions and norms in use in legislative Italian.