Discourse patterning and recursion in the EU case law

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach to analysing the text organization of legal texts, specifically focusing on discourse patterning and recursion in the context of EU case law. The study investigates the discourse organization of the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) by exploring, in a data-driven analysis, the use of multiword expressions that occur with specific colligation properties. One peculiarity of CJEU judgments is that their structure is not readily visible since headings are unsystematically used. The application of the present approach demonstrated that discourse organization can be revealed in terms of discourse patterns, signalling devices, and by exploring the position of linguistic expressions in the text. The findings not only reveal concealed text organization units in CJEU judgments but also offer a methodological model for similar analyses in other legal and non-legal texts. The proposed model suggests an investigation of the interaction between metadiscourse (IMD), discourse patterns (DPD), and textual colligation, positing that when IMD and DPD exhibit textual colligation, they signal discourse patterning. This proposal connects two levels of text organization through textual correlation. The study further explores relations between discourse patterns in terms of the notion of recursion.