Resumen de Collocations of Terms in EU Competition Law: a Corpus Analysis of EU English Collocations

Łucja Biel, Agnieszka Biernacka, Anna Jopek Bosiacka

• The objective of this chapter is, first, to identify key terms in EU Competition Law in English and, secondly, to identify and examine their collocational environment via the corpus methodology. The first part of the chapter presents a theoretical background on EU English as a supranational variety of English due to the increased mediation of content through translators and non-native English-speaking authors. The chapter next discusses the role of collocations, focusing on collocations of legal terms and collocations in EU English. Section 4 describes the EU Competition Corpus (1.5 million words), comprised of EU legislation, case law and “praxis” documents on Competition Law. The corpus was used to extract term-node candidates (103 terms). Their collocational environment was analysed through words sketches and concordances in Sketch Engine and WordSmith. The analysis has focused on the following aspects of collocations: semantic prosodies, collocational ranges (combinatory potential), derivational productivity, international prefixes, Latinisms, premodification by –ing and –ed participles, adjectives with negative connotations, deverbal and deadjectival nouns and an atypical grammatical behaviour of certain patterns. Last but not least, the chapter draws attention to a high variation of terminology and phraseology at various levels, which contributes to the hybridity of EU English