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Published in:
Introduction: The Role of the Language in EU Law Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Collocations of Terms in EU Competition Law: A Corpus Analysis of EU English Collocations

Authors : Łucja Biel, Agnieszka Biernacka, Anna Jopek-Bosiacka

Published in: Language and Law

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

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.

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previous chapter Binomials in EU Competition Law
next chapter The Glossary of EU English Competition Collocations and Terms
Footnotes
1
Firth (1957), p. 11.
 
2
See Chap. 15 in this volume.
 
3
Seidlhofer (2010) and Pozzo (2012a, b).
 
4
McAuliffe (2017).
 
5
European Commission (2014). See also Robinson (2017), p. 243, who observes that first drafts of EU legislation are written and examined by lawyer-linguists mainly in English.
 
6
Hanzl and Beaven (2017), p. 140, fn 1.
 
7
Article 3, Consolidated version of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) (OJ C 326, 26.10.2012, p. 13).
 
8
Seidlhofer (2010), p. 360.
 
9
Seidlhofer (2010), p. 356; Biel (2017).
 
10
Articles 5 and 6, Council Regulation (EEC) No 1 of 15 April 1958 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community (OJ 17, 6.10.1958, p. 385).
 
11
Derlén (2015), p. 68.
 
12
Biel (2017), pp. 39–41, for further discussion.
 
13
Krzyżanowski and Wodak (2011).
 
14
Mattila (2013), p. 33.
 
15
Glanert (2008), p. 168.
 
16
Koskinen (2013).
 
18
Seidlhofer (2010), p. 365.
 
19
Modiano (2017), pp. 314, 323.
 
20
Modiano (2017), p. 314, see also Doczekalska this volume.
 
21
Catenaccio (2008), p. 276; Pozzo (2012b), p. 1196, Robertson (2012), p. 1237, Modiano (2017), p. 322.
 
22
Salmi-Tolonen (1994); Crystal (2003), p. 182; Gardner (2017).
 
23
This phenomenon applies also to French.
 
24
Biel (2014), p. 64, Gardner (2017), p. 149.
 
25
Doczekalska (2009), p. 360.
 
26
Koskinen (2008), p. 63, on code-switching in multilingual institutions.
 
27
Biel (2014).
 
28
E.g. in respect of the European Commission, 3.1% of its staff has declared British as their first nationality (plus 1.8%—Irish nationality and 0.5%—Maltese), cf. Statistical Bulletin for the Commission on 1.10.2017, https://​ec.​europa.​eu/​info/​sites/​info/​files/​statistical-bulletin-staff-by-nationality-dg_​en.​pdf (Accessed 28 Dec 2017). It should be noted that according to Gardner (2017), p. 150, the UK staff has reduced rapidly by about 50% since 2004 and further reductions may be expected after Brexit.
 
29
cf. Wagner et al. (2002), p. 70; Tosi (2002), p. 178; Gardner (2017), p. 150; Hanzl and Beaven (2017), p. 141.
 
30
cf. Tosi (2002), p. 184, Wagner et al. (2002), p. 76.
 
31
cf. van Els (2001), p. 344; Seidlhofer (2010), p. 362.
 
32
Gardner (2017), pp. 153–162.
 
33
Modiano (2017), p. 322.
 
34
Modiano (2017), p. 322.
 
35
Gardner (2017), p. 154.
 
36
European Commission (2016).
 
37
Gardner (2017), p. 150.
 
38
Caliendo (2004), p. 163.
 
39
van Els (2001), p. 329.
 
40
Šarčević (2010), pp. 34–35.
 
41
Pozzo (2012b), p. 1198, Crystal (2003), p. 182, Robertson (2010), pp. 3, 6.
 
42
Schäffner (2000), p. 3.
 
43
In particular, the traditional terminology may be perceived as “loaded” in some national contexts, cf. Whittaker (2006), p. 60.
 
44
Mattila (2013), pp. 157–158, Šarčević (2018), p. 21.
 
45
cf. Bajčić (2017), p. 83.
 
46
Šarčević (2007), p. 44.
 
47
Jopek-Bosiacka (2011), p. 26.
 
48
Robertson (2012), p. 1237, see also Šarčević (2001), p. 43.
 
49
Case 283/81 CILFIT [1982] ECR 3415, ECLI:EU:C:1982:335.
 
50
Modiano (2017), p. 314.
 
51
Modiano (2017), pp. 319–321.
 
52
Wray (2002), p. 9.
 
53
The term collocation is often used as a synonym of phraseology/phraseme and covers idioms, proverbs, etc. Partington (1998).
 
54
Baker (1992), p. 47.
 
55
Nesselhauf (2005), p. 12.
 
56
Stubbs (2004), p. 111.
 
57
Sinclair (1991), p. 110.
 
58
Bhatia et al. (2004), p. 206.
 
59
Alcaraz and Hughes (2002), p. 9.
 
60
cf. Larson (1998[1984]), Baker (1992), p. 48, Hatim and Munday (2004), p. 251.
 
61
cf. Howarth (1998).
 
62
cf. Newmark (1981), p. 180, Larson (1998[1984]), p. 160, Mauranen (2000).
 
63
Nesselhauf (2005), p. 2.
 
64
cf. Howarth (1998) and Nesselhauf (2005).
 
65
Meyer and Mackintosh (1994), Heid (1994), Partington (1998), p. 17, L’Homme (2000).
 
66
L’Homme (2000), p. 91.
 
67
cf. Biel (2012), p. 227.
 
68
cf. Biel (2014), p. 47.
 
69
Kjær (2007), p. 512.
 
70
Biel (2014), p. 44.
 
71
Partington (1998), p. 19.
 
72
Teubert (2010), p. 357.
 
73
Biel (2017).
 
74
Gardner (2017), p. 161.
 
75
European Commission (n.d.).
 
76
European Court of Auditors (2016).
 
77
European Commission (n.d.).
 
78
European Commission (n.d.).
 
79
European Court of Auditors (2016), p. 30.
 
80
European Court of Auditors (2016), p. 30.
 
81
Interestingly, Wikipedia refers to an undertaking as “[T]his uncomfortable English word” (https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​European_​Union_​competition_​law, emphasis added).
 
82
Woods et al. (2017), p. 639.
 
83
Leucht and Marquis (2013).
 
84
Maher (2000), p. 155.
 
85
See Jones and Sufrin on the impact of French and German delegations on the initial shape of EEC Competition Law, with some of the provisions of the ECSC Treaty being drafted by the Harvard law professor Robert Bowie at the request of Jean Monnet; Jones and Sufrin (2016), pp. 36–37 and p. 36, fn 162 and Elhauge and Geradin (2011), p. 49.
 
86
See e.g. Kolasiński (2012), Kępiński (2014) on the foreign impact on Polish Competition Law.
 
89
Kilgarriff et al. (2014).
 
90
Scott (2017).
 
91
Consolidated version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (OJ C 326, 26.10.2012, p. 47).
 
92
Directive 2014/104/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 November 2014 on certain rules governing actions for damages under national law for infringements of the competition law provisions of the Member States and of the European Union (OJ L 349, 5.12.2014, p. 1).
 
93
Case C-453/99, Courage and Crehan [2001] ECR I-6297, ECLI:EU:C:2001:465.
 
94
See Elhauge and Geradin (2011), pp. 51–52 on the growing importance of these instruments in shaping the EU’s Competition policy by clarifying the approach behind enactments.
 
95
OJ C 130, 19.5.2010, p. 1.
 
96
OJ C 101, 27.4.2004, p. 2.
 
97
Figures in brackets provide a normalised frequency (NF) per 1 million words (pmw), as opposed to a raw frequency (RF), that is a frequency in the entire corpus.
 
98
Semantic prosody is “a consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates” (Louw (1993), p. 157).
 
99
Rodger and MacCulloch (2015), p. 2.
 
100
Jones and Townley (2017), pp. 510, 512.
 
101
Jopek-Bosiacka (2010), pp. 114–115, for further discussion.
 
102
Biber et al. (1999), pp. 590–591.
 
103
Kjær (2007), p. 506, Biel (2012), p. 227.
 
104
This is consistent with Hoey’s priming hypothesis concerning polysemous words ((2005), p. 13).
 
105
Infoterm (2005), p. 10.
 
106
Bowker and Hawkins (2006), p. 85.
 
107
Gotti (2005), pp. 37–40.
 
108
Biber et al. (1999), p. 589.
 
109
An example from the corpus: Guidelines on Vertical Restraint (OJ C 130, 19.5.2010, p. 1).
 
110
Whish and Bailey (2015), p. 729.
 
111
cf. Modiano (2017), p. 322.
 
113
As an aside, in some cases, prosodies may be stretched to the limit, e.g. the use of to merit which should collocate with positive objects: the applicant’s limited or passive participation in the PG Paperboard did not merit a fine or, at most, merited only a small fine.
 
114
Langacker (2008), p. 105.
 
115
Jopek-Bosiacka (2010), p. 115.
 
116
Gotti (2005), pp. 78–80.
 
117
As observed e.g. by Gardner (2017).
 
118
Biber et al. (1999), p. 307.
 
119
Freixa (2006), p. 63.
 
120
Bowker and Hawkins (2006), p. 81.
 
121
Freixa (2006), p. 51.
 
122
Walter (2016), p. 58, fn 318.
 
123
Directive 2004/18/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 31 March 2004 on the coordination of procedures for the award of public works contracts, public supply contracts and public service contracts (OJ L 134, 30.4.2004, p. 114).
 
124
Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014 of 17 June 2014 declaring certain categories of aid compatible with the internal market in application of Articles 107 and 108 of the Treaty (OJ L 187, 26.6.2014, p. 1).
 
125
cf. Bowker and Hawkins (2006), p. 80.
 
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Metadata
Title
Collocations of Terms in EU Competition Law: A Corpus Analysis of EU English Collocations
Authors
Łucja Biel
Agnieszka Biernacka
Anna Jopek-Bosiacka
Copyright Year
2018
Book
Language and Law

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90904-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-90905-9

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90905-9_14