Objectives

Empirical objectives: DISSECT and COMPARE

• Anatomy: to contribute robust descriptive data on the properties of legal and EU terms as to their form, morphosyntactic structure, local term grammar, thematic content, complexity, distribution, non-experts’ exposure to constituents of legal terms, automatic term recognition;
• Comparative legal linguistics: to analyse whether EU English terms differ from UK English and Irish legal terms;

Theoretical objective: INTEGRATE AND EXPLAIN

• Theory: to advance an evidence-based theoretical reflection on terms and termness: what makes a term a legal / EU term? What is a prototypical legal/EU term? Relation between general and special language?

Applied objective: IMPROVE

• Methods: to inform research on terminology: How to measure the complexity of terms? How to scale up research on terms?
• Clarity: to identify ways of more effective legal communication with legal professionals and non-experts through an enhanced understanding of the complexity of terms: Can legal terms be simplified?