Caratteristiche linguistiche del linguaggio normativo (costituzione italiana ed egiziana a confronto)

 
This article reppresents an analytical description of the linguistic characteristics of the Italian constitution (issued in 1947 with its latest amendments in 2012) and Egyptian constitution (promulgated in 2014).
Being the supreme document that regulates the rights and duties, the constitution aroused the interest not only of jurists, but also of linguists – who aim to verify the morphosyntactic and semantic correctness of the text as well as to examine whether the legislative text has achieved its goals by realizing its communicative value through a transparent and clear textuality- elements that guarantee uniqueness. In order to achieve this, the regulatory texts should have identical linguistic forms.
The article starts with the history of the two constitutions followed by the analysis of the linguistic characteristics on the lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic levels.
Having examined the two texts, I noted the following at the lexical level: common words prevail; loanwords and neologisms exist as long as they have entered the language and have no existing correspondents; there is always a univocity such as to exclude semantic ambiguity.
At the syntactic level, the two texts have revealed similarities in the following syntactic structures: high frequency of short sentences, prevalence of parataxis, scarce evidence of the incisions; use of tenses and verbal modes which indicate the same sense of certainty; limited use of passive forms, frequency of the nominal style.
Pragmatically, the two texts showed a logical organization, coherence, cohesion and use of punctuation marks that facilitate the reading and understanding of the text.