Linguistic variation in primary EU legal texts: Evidence from (null) subjects in the Italian Constitution and the Italian version of the Treaty of the European Union

Abstract

Many recent studies in legal linguistics investigated the variation within and across legal varieties of various EU Treaty languages focusing on the question of whether the multilingualism of the EU has led to the development of so-called eurolects with properties different from those of the national legal variety. But a crucial property of many Treaty languages, namely null subjects, has not been analysed systematically. A proper assessment of the presumed influence of English as the main drafting language requires detailed analyses of how syntax and pragmatics interact in this grammatical domain together with the specific requirements of legal language in the legal varieties of null subject Treaty languages. The present study aims to contribute to this overarching goal by providing a quantitative and qualitative analysis of two primary Italian legal texts, namely the complete text of the Italian version of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) and its functionally equivalent parts of the Italian Constitution (CONST). The central finding is that the domain of subject expression in the two studied legal documents, although far apart in time, follows the individual language properties and processing properties, contradicting cross-linguistically motivated assumptions related to an absence of null subjects. Observed effects of the influence from English concern a reduced number of postverbal subjects and the increased use of overt subject pronouns (egli/esso series) in the TEU.