Il Bundesteilhabegesetz: il testo normativo e i suoi dintorni

The paper focuses on the peritext and epitext of the Bundesteilhabegesetz (‘Federal Participation Act’), which regulates the right to participation in society by people with disabilities in Germany. The peritext consists of the titles of the Act (long title, short title, and an abbreviation) and of the titles of its components. The epitext includes a) legal lexicons and dictionaries and generalist dictionaries in German and b) a corpus of texts in German, which, in turn, is divided into two subcorpora: a subcorpus of newspaper articles (2015-2021) created through the Dow Jones Factiva database, and a subcorpus of texts from the website of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Based on the hypothesis that the epitext reduces the complexity of the peritext and, at the same time, passes evaluative judgements on the law, the aims of this analysis are: to describe the complexity of the peritext from a structural, functional, and morphosyntactic point of view; to investigate the meanings of the most relevant terms (Teilhabe and Menschen mit Behinderungen) in dictionaries, and to see how the three titles of the Act are scattered in different text types and which aspects are highlighted in the words that occur together with them. The analysis also makes some observations on the Italian terms partecipazione and persone con disabilità.