Nuovo appuntamento con “Peter’s Pills“, la rubrica online di Legal English by Federnotizie (la rivista online di Federnotai), in collaborazione con Confprofessioni e Beprof. La 27esima video-lezione “Company meeting words” è disponibile sul sito www.federnotizie.it, sui canali social e sul sito di Confprofessioni e sull’app Beprof, scaricabile da App Store e Google Play.
LESSON N. 27: CLICCA SOTTO PER IL VIDEO
Transcript:
Hello! Today we look at some useful collocations for Legal English.
Collocation is a set of generally two, but sometimes three words used together to sound natural and correct in English. If you don’t use the right words together your English will sound incorrect and wrong.
For example, “merry” collocates with “Christmas”, so we say “Merry Christmas”, but “merry” does not collocate with “new year”, so if you say “Merry New Year” it sounds wrong and very unnatural. In fact, we say “Happy New Year”. For the same reason we say “fast food”, and not “quick food”, but we say a “quick shower” and not a “fast shower”. It is not enough, to just learn words, but you should try to learn words that collocate together.
Good examples of collocation in Legal English are verbs like “Violate”, “breach”, “break”, “disobey”, and “infringe”, which are synonyms, and fundamentally all mean the same thing, but which collocate with different nouns.
Here are the most common collocations of these words:
breach a contract
breach/break someone’s trust
breach confidentiality
breach security
break/disobey/violate the law
break/breach someone’s trust
break a treaty
break/disobey/infringe a rule
break speed limits
disobey/break/infringe/ a rule
disobey/break an order
disobey a command
disobey a court order
disobey/break/violate the law
infringe a right
infringe copyright
infringe a trademark
infringe a patent
infringe/break/disobey a rule
violate/break/disobey the law
violate privacy
violate sanctions
violate human rights
Thank you very much and see you next time for more Peter’s Pills to improve your Legal English!
How good is your general English collocation? Try some exercises here:
- Speak Speak – Intermediate vocabulary exercise: collocations
- English Practise – Collocations exercise
- Business English Resources – Advanced Collocations Exercises
- Englishexercises.org – Collocations