A Syntactic Study of International Law as Represented by UN Human Rights Treaties in 2006

Abstract

This thesis explores the syntactic features of the UN human rights treaties of the 2000s as an instance of public international law. The analyzed corpus comprises the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (CPED) in 2006, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006. The study adopts both a corpus-based approach by using Biber et al.’s (2007) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) as a framework and a corpus-driven approach by relying on the corpus evidence. AntConc software is mainly used for the quantitative analysis. The findings prove that the language of law has distinct syntactic features that distinguish it from other varieties of language. The analysis also reveals the functions of these features, and shows that the language of law can be ambiguous. Key words: syntactic features – language of law – UN human rights treaties – corpus linguistics – LGSWE