Nominal versus verbal syntactic patterns in English and Polish on the basis of the selected Community legislation

Abstract

The present study intends to examine the use of the nominal and verbal syntactic patterns in a corpus of 20 different instruments in the English and Polish version of the Community legislation. The issues discussed cover: the frequency of passive- and other syntactic patterns- occurrence in English and Polish as well as an attempt to establish certain rules that would account for the differences in the results obtained in the course of the analysis. The hypothesis underlying the present investigations is that Polish language is more nominal in nature. Since legal language favors the use of ‘subjectless’ sentences the subject of the sentence is rarely mentioned. However, in Polish it is sometimes unnatural to employ repetitive passive constructions, especially in literary written discourse which seeks syntactic variety and dynamism. Whether this reluctance towards passive also applies to legal discourse as exemplifi ed in the Community legislation is a question to be resolved. We shall see whether techniques such as nominalizations or the active voice are favored more than the passives.