A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EUROPEAN V AND BRITISH LEGAL TEXTS: DIRECTIVES VS. STATUTES
A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EUROPEAN V AND BRITISH LEGAL TEXTS: DIRECTIVES VS. STATUTES

Summary/Abstract: When doing business in the European Union, it is important to know and understand the EU legislation. Legal language is often incomprehensible to the general public. Specialist writings should be directed not only to an audience with expert knowledge in the field but also to ordinary people. The purpose of this article is to analyze the language of law used in British and European legislative documents. Legal language is defined as a technical language, a language which is used by specialists. Legal language is characterized by an impersonal style with formulaic structures, long sentences, typical legal vocabulary and syntactic complexity. I will try to point out the accuracy and precision used in legal style as well as the different ways of expressing modality. The European directives used in this work were taken from the Official Journal of the European Communities and the Acts of Parliament from the online UK Statute Law Database.

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