| Keywords [eng] |
legal, discourse, media, simplification, lexical, bundles, word, frequency, corpus, analysis, comparison, study, teisinis, diskursas, žiniasklaida, tesktynai, leksinės, samplaikos. |
| Abstract [eng] |
Legal language and terminology is more relevant to a layman than ever before. Because of that, it is getting increasingly important to understand legal discourse even without having any legal education. The focus of this paper is the comparison of legal discourse and media discourse to see if any features of simplification can be identified. Two case studies were performed, four corpora in total were compiled, two corpora for each study. One corpus represented legal language and consisted of the official case report from the European Court of Human Rights, while the other corpus represented media discourse and consisted of various online news articles from different internet portals that discussed specific legal cases. With the help of AntConc (Anthony 2020) a corpus analysis software, word frequency lists were generated and analyzed. Using the same software 4-word most frequent lexical bundles lists were also generated and investigated. Functional and structural analyses of the lexical bundles were carried out as well, they were based on a previous study done by Biber et al. (2004). It was found that certain legal terms, words and expressions were avoided in media discourse and replaced with less complex alternatives. It was also found that that certain details of the cases like specific legal acts, articles of conventions and directives were more often than not omitted in media discourse. |
