Description

The corpus was collected throughout 2020, combining semi-automatic and manual searches via the Bootcat toolkit. The final selection comprises different textual types which all pertain to the general definition of "legal lay language", i.e. legal texts which share the intent of being read – and most critically, understood – by a non-specialized audience. The corpus includes: 1. 247 summaries of European legislation per language (all summaries published in 2019). 2. 45 terms of use of websites per language (taken from the Alexa 500 most clicked websites in Italy and Uk for 2019) 3. 15 standard bank contracts per language (only documents freely accessible online) 4. 15 utilities contracts per language (5 phone, 5 gas and electricity, 5 Internet providers. Only documents freely accessible online). Part 1 and 2 are designed to be parallel in the two languages, while part 3 and 4 are independent for each language. The Italian subcorpus amounts to 1M tokens, while the English subcorpus amounts to 800K tokens. associated publications: Busso, L. (2022). Lexicon and Grammar in Legal-Lay Language: a Quantitative Corpus Study on Italian. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata (SILTA), 2022 (1). 5-32. Busso, L. (forthcoming). CorIELLS: A specialised bilingual corpus of lay legal communication. Proceedings of the Societá Italiana di Linguistica Conference, September 2021. Busso, L. (forthcoming). An investigation of the lexico-grammatical profile of English legal- lay language. Journal of Language and Law.

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