A linguistic investigation of the Lisbon Treaty

This investigation is an attempt to show that language is phraseological, both general language and specific language – European legal discourse in the case in point – and that text is nothing but phraseology of one kind of another. Individual words are yielded and then the clusters that these individual words create are looked at. Finally key-clusters are extracted, referencing the Lisbon Treaty against a corpus of general English (the British National Corpus was chosen as a reference corpus), thus arriving at what is the typical phraseology of European legal discourse. The importance of parallel corpora is also highlighted, providing a range of possible translation equivalents already verified by actual translation usage