ABSTRACT
The creation and expansion of the European Union has generated wide interest and increasing recognition across disciplinary perspectives. This has been so for a number of reasons, the first and most intuitive one being that the EU legal framework has brought not only speakers but also different and at times heterogeneous legal systems closer together. From a discursive point of view, research has turned to the relationship between the structure of judicial texts and their distinctive rhetorical properties. in 2013, Pontrandolfo adopts a contrastive approach focusing on prepositional phrases across English, Spanish and Italian judicial texts. In the attempt to sharpen our knowledge of phraseology as a leading principle of discourse organisation, the analysis proposed here delves into lexical bundles as a suitable candidate for the description of regularity in judicial text. Some legal commentators might suggest that the centrality of cases such as those instantiated by the corpus could be easily grasped even without recourse to corpus tools.
