ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the field of legal linguistics by providing evidence for the use of formulaic and hybrid expressions in legal language. It focuses on judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The chapter proposes new empirical methods for the study of discourse organization and of semantic and grammatical profiles of lexical items. The notion of hybridity that has its origin in the 19th century discourse of race was first introduced to social science as an analytical tool by Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination. Local co-selection relations between lexical items include restricted options because they involve constraints of combination of words. In a previous study, it was demonstrated that paragraph initial multi-word units signal the discourse organization of the entire texts of CJEU judgments. The main pattern observed in that study was that the argumentation is based on the Consideration-Conclusion pattern. Semantically, this pattern corresponds to the consequential type of Causal-conditional types of logico-semantic relations.
