A corpus-based study of ethically sensitive issues in EU directives, national transposition measures and the press

Abstract

This paper is set in the framework of the Eurolect Observatory Project, which is studying the differences between the EU varieties of legislative language (Eurolects) and their corresponding national legal varieties in 11 languages (Mori 2018). In this paper, our focus is on ethics and legislation: more specifically, the research question is whether any differences can be detected in the discursive construction of ethically sensitive issues in the English version of EU directives, their related national transposition measures adopted in the UK, and press articles reporting on the introduction, revision or implementation of such laws. In this sense, news reports and comments are seen as sitting at the end of a genre chain covering the whole spectre of knowledge dissemination, from the expert (legislation) to the popularising level (newspaper article). The ethically sensitive issues in question concern human health and animal welfare, and the corpora used for the study were selected from the English section of the EOMC (Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus) and from the Lexis-Nexis database of press articles.