Discourse on medically assisted procreation: from legal institutions to blogs

This corpus-based study investigates variation in the use of multi-word terms understood as depositories of specialised knowledge in a system of genres revolving around the ECtHR case Parrillo v. Italy: third-party interventions, judgment, judicial opinions, legal summary, press release and blogs. The study uses a combined framework of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to compare distributional patterns of legal and bioethical multi-word terms across six different genres as well as the linguistic representation of the main concept of embryo. The results provide confirmatory evidence of diaphasic variation, involving different terminological rigour depending on the institutional stratification as well as “strategic” variation introduced in persuasive genres to enhance a potential reading key.