SUMMARIES OF EU LEGAL ACTS: A PROVENANCE CLASSIFICATION OF THE LEXICON (BASED ON REGULATIONS (EU) 2017/745 AND 2017/746)

Abstract

The article presents a provenance-based classification of the lexicon in EUR-Lex Summaries of EU legislation, according to which lexical units are structured by their origin rather than by their meaning or textual function. The provenance approach is based on the premise that the summary lexicon is formed not by reducing the vocabulary of the corresponding act, but through the consistent application of specific text-producing operations, each of which forms its own type of lexical units. Based on the material of summaries to Regulation (EU) 2017/745 on medical devices and Regulation (EU) 2017/746 on in vitro diagnostic medical devices, five operations have been identified: direct transfer of vocabulary from the definitions article of the act (inherited legal lexicon: notified body, manufacturer, harmonised standard); condensation of a list or technical feature (reformulated legal lexicon: instrument, apparatus, appliance… reagent compressed into products); insertion of units absent from the act, with two subtypes (editorial vocabulary): evaluative (high-quality, clearer and more stringent, rigorous, tightens the rules, end up on the market) and illustrative (bandages, hip replacements, pacemakers, HIV or hepatitis tests, coloured contact lenses); application of the EUR-Lex genre template (genre-template vocabulary: KEY TERMS, BACKGROUND, RELATED DOCUMENTS); and cross-referencing to other EU legal acts (intertextual lexicon, specifically the vocabulary of inter-act references). It has been established that only two of the five operations (direct transfer from the definitions article of the act and condensation) rely directly on the text of the corresponding act, while the rest result from editorial actions or are determined by the genre model of the summary. Based on this, we argue that the summary lexicon is not exclusively the result of source text condensation. Combining evaluative and illustrative vocabulary into a single operation is justified by the fact that both subtypes share the same origin (insertion) and differ only in the nature of the introduced content. It is concluded that a summary is appropriately described as a text with a composite lexical architecture, and summary creation as the lexical construction of a new secondary text, in which the condensation of the original act is merely one of several text-producing operations