Il linguaggio normativo delle Comunità europee : studi quantitativi e semantici sul lessico con particolare riguardo al concetto di ambiente

Sammanfattning: The main aim of this research is to present some aspects and linguistic characteristics of the language used in law documents of secondary legislation, issued in Italian by the European Community. The documents deal with questions regarding environmental politics and are part of a corpus created at the French and Italian department of Stockholm university.The work is divided into two main parts. The first part presents the results of the research, which in turn provide general information about the material presented. A chapter dedicated to statistical analysis also indicates how the various categories of words are distributed.The second part of this research concentrates on the concept of 'ambiente' which emerges from the documents. A semasiological analysis of the concept of 'ambiente' (eng. environment) follows the development of this word from when it first appeared up to the present day and there is also a lexical-semasiological study both of the single words and the syntagms which are connected to the semantics of 'ambiente'.This analysis clearly indicates that from a purely linguistic point of view, syntagms and not single words constitute the specialist element of the material examined. Furthermore, in most cases the meaning of 'ambiente' implicitly implies the idea of manmade alterations, usually linked (as can be seen by the widespread use of the neologism 'ecologia', eng. ecology) to an image of risk and negativity deriving from the shifting of an equilibrium.Finally, there is an analysis of nominal syntagms made up of qualifying adjectives and nouns. The results obtained from this analysis lead to the hypothesis that although the adjectives are qualifying, they do not have an attributive function. They are either strongly referential or deictic-anaphoric. Furthermore adjectives are often combined with nouns in syntagms, with varying degrees of cohesiveness, in order to form technical terms. However, despite this, there is abundant use of synonyms, probably for stylistic or rhetorical reasons.