The collocational profile of employment and work in UK employment law
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34739/clg.2023.15.05Keywords:
legal language, collocation, synonym, corpus, employment lawAbstract
The paper investigates the collocational profile of two words of similar meaning, i.e. employment and work, in the UK employment law. The study is intended to shed some light on the behaviour of the two words in the specialist language context of UK employment law. It is a corpus study based on a corpus of 12 UK employment statutes compiled for the purpose of analysing this area of English legal language. The empirical material is collected and processed with Sketch Engine, a corpus analysis tool. In particular the study looks at (a) the status of the words as terminological units and synonyms, (b) word combinations in which the words appear in the corpus, (c) the meaning that the context of use implies, and (d) the potential benefits of such empirical material in the area of foreign language for special purposes use. The findings suggest that employment and work are synonyms, yet they are used in different word combinations in the context of UK employment law which may derive from the strictly legislative context that does not welcome synonymy.
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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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