Employee, worker, jobholder, agent, staff and workforce in UK employment legislation: A genre-specific corpus study on synonymy, collocations and meaning
Agnieszka Rzepkowska
University of Siedlce, PolandAgnieszka Rzepkowska, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the University of Siedlce, Poland. She earned a B.A. in Foreign Economic Relations from the Warsaw School of Economics, as well as a B.A. and M.A. in English Studies and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Warsaw. Her main area of interest is language for special purposes (LSP). She has published a number of papers and a monograph on terminology and terminography, focusing on the structure and applicability of interdisciplinary professional dictionaries. Her recent research focuses on corpus studies in LSP, particularly legal language, specialist collocations, and LSP teaching.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3381-0870
Abstract
In legal texts, synonymy may lead to confusion, especially if the synonymous words are terms which, by definition, should be unambiguous. This paper addresses the issue of synonyms in legal language through a genre-specific corpus study of employee, worker, jobholder, agent, staff and workforce – legal terms that appear similar in meaning – in the corpus of UK employment legislation. Specifically, the study looks at (a) the distribution of the terms in the corpus to determine the areas of law in which they are used, (b) the definitions of these terms in legal dictionaries, as well as general and business English dictionaries if the legal dictionaries fail to provide definitions, along with legal definitions from the 12 legislative documents constituting the corpus, (c) the immediate context of use (the co-text) to identify the most typical word combinations with the terms (candidate collocates), and (d) the differences between the terms based on the definitions and the collocational profile of the terms. The findings suggest that, to some extent, the meanings of the terms overlap, indicating that they function as synonyms. However, they are not interchangeable in legislative acts as indicated by both their distribution in the corpus and their immediate context. Additionally, the study identified not only candidate collocations but also several multi-word terms defined within the legal acts.
Keywords:
collocation, corpus, legal discourse, legal language, multi-word term, synonym, word combinationReferences
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Agency Workers Regulations 2010
Employment Rights Act 1996
Equality Act 2010
Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974
National Minimum Wage Act 1998
Part-Time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000
Pensions Act 2008
The Fixed-term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002
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University of Siedlce, Poland
Agnieszka Rzepkowska, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the University of Siedlce, Poland. She earned a B.A. in Foreign Economic Relations from the Warsaw School of Economics, as well as a B.A. and M.A. in English Studies and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Warsaw. Her main area of interest is language for special purposes (LSP). She has published a number of papers and a monograph on terminology and terminography, focusing on the structure and applicability of interdisciplinary professional dictionaries. Her recent research focuses on corpus studies in LSP, particularly legal language, specialist collocations, and LSP teaching.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3381-0870
