The research and the findings presented here are an overview and summation of a segment of the work carried out by the author as a part of their doctoral thesis research titled „English translation equivalents of Croatian relative clauses in the documents of the European Union“. While both English and Croatian employ comparable finite relative clauses in postmodifying functions in a noun phrase, English can also make use of various non-finite clauses to perform the same function. The difference in the variety of relative constructions that can occur in noun phrases and their frequency has been placed under investigation here. This paper aims to investigate the presence of relative constructions in the above-stated language pair, focusing on the variety of forms occurring in legal texts, and compare the translation equivalents and their frequency in corresponding texts. A parallel corpus of English and Croatian texts was utilized to explore the usage of relative constructions in the specialized genre of legal texts. The corpus assembled for this purpose contains several types of legal documents published by key European Union institutions over the course of several decades. All instances of relative constructions in both languages were extracted and classified by their type and source, while the sentences containing them were assessed for their length and complexity. The preliminary results indicate that there are noticeable differences in the frequencies of occurence of relative constructions between document types and that non-finite -ed clauses dominate in terms of frequency across all types. In addition, the diachronic interpretation of results shows signs of increased nominalization over the last three decades.
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