Investigating Judicial Phraseology with COSPE: A contrastive Corpus-based Study

This chapter describes the results of an empirical study of lsp phraseological units in a specific domain (criminal law) and type of legal genre (criminal judgments). The final goal of the research is to provide legal translators with a multifunctional resource having a positive impact on the translation process and product. More specifically, it aims at assisting translators – as well as legal experts – to develop their phraseological competence through exposure to real, authentic (con)texts in which these phraseological units are used. Based on cospe, a 6-million trilingual, comparable corpus of criminal judgments, this study approaches phraseology from a contrastive (Spanish-Italian-English), quantitative and qualitative perspective. Corpus analysis and term extraction have been carried out by means of concordancers (mainly WordSmith Tools v. 5.0). From a methodological point of view, the study combines corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches, as well as traditional approaches applied to Language for General Purposes (lgp) phraseology, and more recent distributional studies of Language for Specific Purposes (lsp) and legal phraseology. Emphasis is placed on four categories of phraseological units frequently found in judicial discourse: complex prepositions, lexical doublets and triplets, lexical collocations and routine formulae.