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