Legislation and Language Project - Publications

Giulia Andriana Pennsini The challenges of language: re-shaping legislative discourse(s) and text(s)
Amicus Curiae Issue 94 Summer 2013 pp 20-24 

The aim of this paper is to explore how the European Commission develops and constructs two Green Papers in the field of labour law in order to provide a communicative response to the important economic, political and social changes affecting the European labour market. More specifically, these two texts will be presented as a combination of different discourses that, through the intentional use of lexico-grammatical resources, are strategically exploited to mould the norms and conventions typical of public documents such as Green Papers and consultation documents to promote a positive image of the European Union Institutions, while providing legislative drafters with very poor indications about the specific measures to take in order to put the Commission's indications into practice.

Helen Xanthaki and Giulia Andriana Pennsini Crossing the Borders between Legislative Drafting and Linguistics: Linguists to the Aid of Legislative Drafters
Explorations in Language and Law Issue 1 2012 pp 83-109

This article aims to prove that linguists can contribute to phronetic legislative drafting by means of supplying a tried methodology towards effectiveness of the law. Linguistics may investigate the way in which meaning and text functions evolve in the process of text production; find out what the functions of the produced texts are; and asses the texts' functions match with the original intensions of the drafters. In turn this can allow the drafters to become aware of how the law's functions can match the intention of drafters, thus developing techniques that can lead to the desired result. Based on the study of language in the Treaty of Lisbon, this article proves that there is scope for interdisciplinary analysis by crossing the barrier between legislative drafters and linguists; a common agenda between legislative drafting and linguistics; and that drafters can use lexico-grammatical and discoursal analysis as an effective tool for their investigations.