LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF GERMAN LANGUAGE IN THE CONTEXT OF EU-LAW: THE EXAMPLE OF THE TREATY OF AMSTERDAM

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring linguistic features of the German language of law within the supranational legal system of the European Union. In the theoretical part of the paper, linguistic features of the German language of law are presented and analysed based on the prior research of legal texts in the German language. In the empirical part of the paper, linguistic features of the German language are analysed on the corpus of the Amsterdam Treaty with reference to the categorisation of linguistic features established in the theoretical part. The results of the analysis should indicate which linguistic features are specific for the Treaty of Amsterdam as an example of founding treaties of the European Union and to which extent they differ from general features of the German language of law. Qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in the analysis of excerpted examples at relevant linguistic levels. Based on the fact that different legal systems generate different legal concepts as well as specific legal terminology and phraseology, the hypothesis of this paper is that in the text of the Treaty of Amsterdam, as one of the primary sources of the EU law, the most striking differences shall be discovered in the field of terminology and phraseology, i.e. at the levels of morphology, lexicology and style.