ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to profile the judicial variety of the English Eurolect. To better understand the genre profile of judgments issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), we sketch it against (1) UK Supreme Court (UKSC) judgments to track its hybridisation and (2) EU legal acts to identify its similarities and differences to this fundamental legal genre. We use large comparable corpora of texts published in 2010–2019. Compared to regulations, judgments use more argumentative patterns, interpersonal and textual metadiscourse, and more verbs, determiners, adverbs, prepositions and subordinators. Our findings confirm the existence of the judicial English Eurolect, pointing to distinct CJEU and UKSC judicial styles. In particular, CJEU judgments more actively use features which foreground impartiality, power and distance: more rigid macrostructure, depersonalised authorial presence, stronger modals, distant determiners, organisational markers (inference, addition, apposition as opposed to more confrontational contrast/concession markers), numerals and framing with complex prepositions. They are also less lexically rich and use fewer verbs, which reduces their dynamicity. Our data also demonstrate the considerable internal variation of CJEU judgments, with General Court (GC) judgments being more convergent to UKSC judgments in terms of length and selected key genre markers.
