Within the genre “Written Parliamentary questions” in English, the main aims of this study were twofold: firstly, to verify the intra-linguistic variation of native language in different institutional social contexts, and secondly, to investigate the features of the language of translation as a ‘third code’. To do this, a comparable monolingual English corpus was created, made up of 3 subcorpora on the thematic areas of climate/environment, migration and transport, each of approximately the same size and referring roughly to the same time-frame: 1) questions in the House of Commons of the UK national Parliament (native English used in a monolingual context), 2) questions in the European Parliament by British and
Irish MEPs (native English used in a multilingual context), and 3) questions in the European Parliament by Italian MEPs (translated English used in a translation context). The language features investigated were sentence length, rhetorical and sentence structure, inter- and intra-sentential connectives, personalisation, lexical density and variety, and, at the lexical level, abstract and connotated words. The analysis was both quantitative (Sketch Engine) and qualitative, and the results of the study generally confirmed the initial expectations, although
for some features they may well have been biased by the stringent norms of the language of this genre within the UK Parliament.
