Typical Collocations in the Judgments on Appeal of the European Court of Justice

Abstract

The research paper aims to identify typical collocations frequently used in the appellate judgments of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and to compare their use with the general English language. The metho-dological guidelines of corpus linguistics were followed in the course of investigation. The research focuses on the analysis of the right verbal collocates of Court. The British National Corpora (BNC) was used as the source of general English. The quantitative methods include applying statistical measures (MI score and log-likelihood) to test the significance of the extracted collocations and to compare the calculated values with those of corresponding collocations in the BNC. The qualitative part of the research focuses on classifying the most frequent collocations of the chosen syntactic pattern (NOUN + VERB) into structural (grammatical) and semantic patterns. The results show that typical collocations used in the appellate judgments of the ECJ differ from the general English language in terms of frequency and statistical significance and exhibit unique semantic characteristics, therefore suggesting that there are considerable lexical differences between legal and general English that should be taken into account in teaching and learning