Abstract
The paper will present the possibilities of the freely accessible online database EUR-Lex for contrastive language research. The database includes official legal documents of the European Union, available in all national language mutations.
It allows up to 24 official EU languages to be compared. The daily updated database contains, for example, contracts, case law or international agreements, classified into individual modules that offer separate searches and other tools for work.
They are especially valuable for contrastive analyzes of contracts and international agreements, whether for comparing vocabulary in the field of terminology, typical turns or the ratio of the use of foreign and domestic words, comparison of syntactic or also specific grammatical phenomena. The same possibilities are also offered by jurisprudence, which in addition gives more room for research in the area of stylistics.
Contrastive analysis of the language of legal documents has implications for further practical use of the language, it could help better understanding and achieving a unified interpretation, which is especially crucial in the legal field.