EU countries show varying degrees of structured actions and monitoring intended to standardise and improve legal drafting in compliance with plain language principles aiming at more readable and comprehensible texts. The present study focuses on the linguistic profile of national and supranational legislative texts in Italian based on three corpora belonging to the Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus. The analysis of syntactic patterns featuring Italian eurolect vs. national legislative Italian show a clear-cut trend: EU directives are less syntactically complex considered a number of parameters and they are characterised by conservative features that affect the readability of Italian legal language at a lesser extent. Data driven results here discussed are combined with the readability assessment of these corpora using READ-IT, a tool which combines traditional raw text features with lexical, morpho-syntactic and syntactic information. Better legislative (linguistic) quality of EU legislation compared to national laws seem to be based upon best lawmaking practices and language planning at EU level and to represent a positive side-effect of the multilingual translation process.
Complessità sintattica e leggibilità. Un monitoraggio linguistico per la valutazione dell'accessibilità di testi legislativi europei e italiani
Mori L
2019-01-01
Abstract
EU countries show varying degrees of structured actions and monitoring intended to standardise and improve legal drafting in compliance with plain language principles aiming at more readable and comprehensible texts. The present study focuses on the linguistic profile of national and supranational legislative texts in Italian based on three corpora belonging to the Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus. The analysis of syntactic patterns featuring Italian eurolect vs. national legislative Italian show a clear-cut trend: EU directives are less syntactically complex considered a number of parameters and they are characterised by conservative features that affect the readability of Italian legal language at a lesser extent. Data driven results here discussed are combined with the readability assessment of these corpora using READ-IT, a tool which combines traditional raw text features with lexical, morpho-syntactic and syntactic information. Better legislative (linguistic) quality of EU legislation compared to national laws seem to be based upon best lawmaking practices and language planning at EU level and to represent a positive side-effect of the multilingual translation process.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
