The Phraseology of Administrative French: A Corpus-Based Study

The French administrative language of the European Union is an emerging discourse: it is only fifty years old, and has its origins in the French administrative register of the middle of the twentieth century, but it is also a unique contact situation in which translation has always played a pivotal role. Using the methodology of corpus linguistics, and a specially compiled corpus of texts, covering a range of genres, this book describes the current discourse of EU French from the perspective of phraseology and collocational patterning, and in particular in comparison with its French national counterpart. Corpus methodology and an inclusive notion of phraseology, embracing typical formulae, locutions, and patterning around keywords, reveal subtleties and patterns which otherwise remain hidden, and point to a discourse of EU French whose novel context of production has led it to be phraseologically conservative, compared with the administrative French of France.