Schlüsselwörter in Grundgesetzen. Ein korpusbasierter Vergleich am Beispiel der Verfassung der Republik Polen und des Grundgesetzes für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland

In the article, a hierarchy of values set in keywords is presented using the example of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland and the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. The second objective is the practical verification of the research method using text word frequencies (tokens) and the so-called TTR (Type-Token-Ratio). Keywords are understood in their colloquial sense as conspicuous carriers of certain contents against the background of the text as a whole. Constitutions have a broad iden­tity of function and form, contain a similar message, are similarly located in the legal order as a legal act of the highest rank, are characterised by a similar content structure and exhibit a high stylistic level in the field of legal language. It is thus investigated whether the aforementioned similarities also apply to the hierarchy of content implied in keywords. The investigation confirmed that differences in the form of government (Germany as a federal state, Poland as a unitary state) do not lead to clear differences at the level of keywords. However, the analysis revealed some limitations in the application of the corpus-based method.