“By partially renouncing their sovereignty...”: on the discourse function(s) of lexical bundles in EU-related Irish judicial discourse

It is well known that the creation of such ever-expanding supra-national bodies as the European Union has brought not only speakers but also different and at times heterogeneous legal systems closer together (Maley 1994; Barceló 1997). EU Membership therefore had a strong impact on common-law countries like the Republic of Ireland: from a legal point of view, these yielded to Community law, i.e. a legal system largely influenced by the civil-law tradition, and they had to create a new legal infrastructure to accommodate the influx of vast amounts of EU legislation in economic and social matters (Dimitrakopoulos 2001; Tomkin 2004; Byrne, McCutcheon et al. 2014). In this context, this paper offers a corpus-based perspective to the study of the judicial discourse of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Ireland within EU-related judgments. On the basis of a corpus of authentic judgments delivered by the Court between 2001 and 2014 (742,194 words), the study is aimed at implementing and combining computer-assisted quantitative methods with manual qualitative text analysis, in the attempt to discern recurrent phraseological patterns in the Court’s discourse. Drawing on the studies by Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2004), Pecorari (2009) and Breeze (2013) on lexical bundles, the investigation therefore focuses on key instances of phraseology in context. Results interestingly show that terms such as jurisdiction, (national) interest, sovereignty and Constitution (mainly collocating with compatible with) may be observed to be particularly prominent in the frequency lists generated for the corpus. By means of a concordance-based study (Sinclair 2003; Morley and Partington 2009), these terms and the related clusters can be taken into account to answer the question of how the Court’s argumentative discourse deals with the fuzzy notion of national jurisdiction and/or interest in the context of an enlarged EU, where national and EU legislation may well overlap or compete with each other on a variety of legal subjects.