Speech patterns in German and British labor law

Introduction

This study is a collaborative work within the core CAL2 team, led by Jun.-Prof. Dr. phil. Friedemann Vogel and assisted by fellow researcher Yinchun Bai. It is funded by the federal state of Baden-Württemberg through the University of Freiburg with the RiSC-Funds (initial funding for "high risk projects") from September 2015 to November 2016.

The foundation of the study is an expanded version of JuReKo-de (Legal Reference Corpus of German Law) - the CAL2 Corpus of European Law. It contains 6,300 German federal statutes (~15 M words), 370,000 court decisions in German (~800 M words), 20,000 court decisions in English (~90 M words) and 43,000 German academic research papers (~200 M words), which equal over 1 billion words in total.

This study is a first attempt to test the CAL2 corpus in action and to explore its applicational possibilities and limitations. Using the English part of the corpus, we analyse the linguistic formulation of the “employee” concept in UK and EU court decisions in terms of the compounding and phrasal structures, the genre-specific co-occurrence partners, and the predication patterns, with the aim to address the following research questions:

  1. What are the central “employee” concepts and “employee”-related concepts within the labour law framework in the UK case law system?
  2. How are the “employee” concepts addressed in UK court decisions in terms of frequent usage patterns?
  3. How similarly and differently are the “employee” concepts linguistically formulated and presented in EU court decisions?

 

News

July 2017: Presentation of project at the Corpus Linguistics Conference in Birmingham

April 2017: Preparation of publication

December 2016: Analyses completed

July 2016: Coding and annotation completed

November 2015: Building theoretical bases

September 2015: Begin of the project