La rappresentazione di scenari deontici e l’espressione della performatività nell’italiano delle leggi: dal diritto europeo alla legislazione nazionale

This study focuses on the intra-linguistic variation between three legislative corpora belonging to the Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus: Corpus A (EU directives); Corpus B (Italian laws of implementation) and Corpus C (national laws of Italian origin). Profiling through Natural Language Processing is combined with quantitative analyses led using corpus-based and corpus-driven methodologies. These data directed qualitative research on relevant phenomena in order to depict the most significant semantic and pragmatic features of legal discourse, namely the deontic encoding and legal performativity. Morphological variants and morphosyntactic patterns featuring the legal framing are detected and exemplified focusing on their double, sometimes overlapped, deontic and performative value. In particular, the role of the present indicative in legislative utterances, the distribution of passive-active diathesis (in relation with agency), the collocational profile of legal verbs as far as the encoding of thetic-constitutive and prescriptive values are concerned, the distribution of legal performatives across corpora and the relationship between performativity and textuality are analysed. Cross-corpora results confirm the existence of context-induced linguistic differences and intra-genre variability within the legal domain related to three legislative varieties: Italian Eurolect (Corpus A), EU-derived legislative Italian (Corpus B) and national legislative Italian (Corpus C).