A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On The Lexical Items In Un Human Rights Treaties And British Domestic Law

The global cause of human rights has made historic progress in recent years.Protecting and supporting human rights is now a unanimous pursuit of all countries,regions,and people of the world.Legal regulation is the most cardinal and effective among many ways to prevent violations and solve relevant problems.As the world’s most authoritative body for the protection of human rights,the United Nations has promoted many nations to enter into the treaty system of human rights.The purpose of this study is to ascertain whether the human rights treaties,being an important source of international humanitarian law,also follow the principle of defending human rights in terms of language.The author collected 44 English versions of UN human rights treaties as the main research material to establish a general corpus.A reference corpus was built by 71 British human-rights-related domestic statutes.Thanks to the “Keywords” function of Ant Conc,overused and underused words of the UN treaties were identified and tabulated.Through the keyword lists,we can see that UN human rights treaties and British law do have their own preferences in lexical items and the differences can be categorized in grammatical ones and semantic ones.The nature of the two sets of laws and the importance they attached to the “human rights in language” might be the possible reasons for the contrasting expressions.In general,with the basic consideration of diverse legal systems and national contexts,the lexical items in the UN treaties are more reflective of the universality and equality of human rights.Those words and phrases involved may be referred to and used in future legislation and legal translations or even on a daily basis to further raise people’s awareness and promote respect for human rights.