‘What’s in a name’? Features and values of nominal style in Food Safety discourse

This study carries out a diachronic investigation of lexical choices adopted by the EU in Directives on Food Safety within the time span within the time span 1982 to 2008 in order to explore ideological implications underlying selection of key phrases and concepts in the different decades. Specifically, nominalisation, although mainly investigated as a lexical and syntactic device (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985; Gyvon 1993), can be found to carry genre-specific restricted values (Bhatia 1993) while providing efficiency and cohesion in legal writing (Gotti 2003) and “may reinforce the idea of impartiality and authoritativeness” (Mattiello 2010: 144). The three decades under examination show a growing concern of the EU about problems in the area of food safety (Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the 1980s, fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 causing spreading into Eastern Europe of fast-food outlets, attention to novel food in the 2000s due to globalisation). The terms investigated show relations of apparent synonymy, like safety, safeness, safeguard, security and protection.