Employee, worker, jobholder, agent, staff and workforce in UK employment legislation: A genre-specific corpus study on synonymy, collocations and meaning

Abstract

In legal texts, synonymy may lead to confusion, especially if the synonymous words are terms which, by definition, should be unambiguous. This paper addresses the issue of synonyms in legal language through a genre-specific corpus study of employee, worker, jobholder, agent, staff and workforce – legal terms that appear similar in meaning – in the corpus of UK employment legislation. Specifically, the study looks at (a) the distribution of the terms in the corpus to determine the areas of law in which they are used, (b) the definitions of these terms in legal dictionaries, as well as general and business English dictionaries if the legal dictionaries fail to provide definitions, along with legal definitions from the 12 legislative documents constituting the corpus, (c) the immediate context of use (the co-text) to identify the most typical word combinations with the terms (candidate collocates), and (d) the differences between the terms based on the definitions and the collocational profile 2 of the terms. The findings suggest that, to some extent, the meanings of the terms overlap, indicating that they function as synonyms. However, they are not interchangeable in legislative acts as indicated by both their distribution in the corpus and their immediate context. Additionally, the study identified not only candidate collocations but also several multi-word terms defined within the legal acts.