Abstract
The present study aims at showing the methodology for building a legal corpus with a special attention paid to the internal structure of legal documents and juridical texts. Built at the University of Turin, the Corpus Jus Jurium tries to cover the entire legal universe current in contemporary Italy, whose life is represented from their first conception in the parlamentary discussion, to their codification in normative rules, to their application in judgements. The Corpus Jus Jurium will be lemmatized, POS-tagged and have added a textual markup, casting some light on the still neglected textual expression of legal and juridical texts, which is decisive for every national legal system. Elaborating texts with such peculiarites implies a long amount of manual work. However, the final result can be an extremely useful resource for translators looking for idioms, collocations or terminological elements in specific parts of texts and for forensic linguists, providing them with an extensive repository of well-structured data and with fine-grained querying opportunities, whether at the morphosyntactic or lexical or textual level.
Highlights
Introduction and objectivesLinguistic corpora are fundamental for analyzing juridical and legal texts as repositories of authentic language data, especially considering that law is, above all, a matter of language, as Cortelazzo (1997, 39) has clearly pointed out: “Il diritto non si serve della lingua, ma è fatto di lingua”, i. e. law does not use the language, but it is ‘a fact of language’.The present paper aims at showing the construction of an Italian legal corpus, the Corpus Jus Jurium, with its different realization phases and its peculiar attention to the internal and textual structure of legal documents and juridical texts
This contribution will be divided into a) a first introductory part; b) a section concerning the collection of data; c) a more specific paragraph on markup procedures; d) an exemplification of the described textual markup; e) possible applications to the fields of legal translation and legal linguistics; f) desirable future developments of the methodology
Started at the University of Turin thanks to an idea of Manuel Barbera and to his tireless fervour lavished in the data collection, the Corpus Jus Jurium aims at covering the entire legal universe current in contemporary Italy, which is rich with examples compared to other systems because of the Italian high productivity of laws
Summary
Linguistic corpora are fundamental for analyzing juridical and legal texts as repositories of authentic language data, especially considering that law is, above all, a matter of language, as Cortelazzo (1997, 39) has clearly pointed out: “Il diritto non si serve della lingua, ma è fatto di lingua”, i. e. law does not use the language, but it is ‘a fact of language’. The present paper aims at showing the construction of an Italian legal corpus, the Corpus Jus Jurium, with its different realization phases and its peculiar attention to the internal and textual structure of legal documents and juridical texts. This contribution will be divided into a) a first introductory part; b) a section concerning the collection of data; c) a more specific paragraph on markup procedures; d) an exemplification of the described textual markup; e) possible applications to the fields of legal translation and legal linguistics; f) desirable future developments of the methodology. Article 5 in particular states that «Le disposizioni di questa legge non si applicano ai testi degli atti ufficiali dello stato e delle amministrazioni pubbliche, sia italiane che straniere», giving scholars the right to collect juridical and legal texts freely)
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