The discourse of bioethics in the ECtHR case-law : A corpus-based perspective

This corpus-based study investigates linguistic practices and strategies of dealing with issues of bioethics in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”). The study aims at researching the linguistic strategies of knowledge production and entextualisation in 92 judgments of the ECtHR, focusing on the interaction between legal and bioethical term-related phraseological units – i.e. multi-word terms and term-embedding collocations with a verb – their structure and distributional patterns. Recurrent phraseological units are identified and analysed using methods of corpus linguistics and the theoretical framework of specialised phraseology. The study pursues general descriptive goals and aims at researching the balance and intersection between bioethically charged phraseology and legal phraseology. The main focus is placed on the analysis of typicality of patterning, expressed in terms of domain specificity, association score and log-likelihood.