Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

Elena Chiocchetti, Verena Lyding
2.2. General characteristics of the corpus
The collection of documents that results from the aforementioned selection criteria applied to
nine legal systems shows the characteristics described below. For each property of the corpus,
its relevance to terminology work is pointed out.
• legal systems: six national legal systems and three supranational frameworks
The legal documents analysed within the project are part of the Austrian, French, German,
Italian, Slovene and Swiss legal systems 9 . Also EU legislation and international treaties have
been collected to ensure coverage of the supranational legal systems of reference. Most
important, Alpine Convention texts have been integrated into the corpus. Strictly speaking,
the latter does not constitute a legal system per se: being an international agreement it
should be considered part of international law, but for harmonisation purposes it seems useful
to be able to analyse its texts and terminology separately from all other legal systems.
• languages: French, German, Italian, Slovene
The LexALP corpus comprises documents in the four languages used by the Alpine states in
their respective legislations. These are also the offi cial languages of the Alpine Convention.
Terminology shall be harmonised in all four languages.
• subject fi elds: spatial planning and sustainable development
All collected texts address the subjects spatial planning and sustainable development. These
two subject fi elds have been indicated by Alpine Convention representatives as the most
urgent ones to be harmonised. Both subjects are delimited and subdivided differently by
each legal system. For the creation of the corpus, the description and subdivision contained
in art. 9 of the Alpine Convention Protocol on Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development
were chosen as a common reference point (see also fi g. 1 below).
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Figure 1: overview of subfi elds
9 Also Liechtenstein and Monaco are part of the Convention, however, their legal texts can not be taken into consideration
within the frame of the current project.
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