Building and Analysing a Legal Corpus on Labour Law: A Comparative Study between France and Senegal

Recent developments in Corpus Linguistics and empirical legal analysis have introduced new opportunities for investigating how legal discourse reflects and reinforces social inequalities. This dissertation explores how legal discourse, particularly within the field of Comparative Labour Law (CLL), can be empirically examined through the integration of leximetric methods and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). The research is embedded in the Worlds of Labour corpus project (WoLCP), an international initiative that combines Leximetrics with Corpus Linguistics to study the evolution of labour law, with particular emphasis on underrepresented jurisdictions in the Global South and the normative treatment of vulnerable groups. Building on this framework, as a methodological illustration, a case study investigates how gender is framed in legislative texts from France and Senegal, two countries linked by a colonial legal legacy but shaped by divergent post-colonial trajectories. A specialised legal corpus (Femme Corpus, FC) was developed and annotated following the Worlds of Labour Corpus project (WoLCP) protocols, consisting of 16 legislative texts equally divided by country and period (colonial and post-colonial), all selected for their relevance to female employment. Using the Sketch Engine corpus query platform, the texts were analysed to identify recurring lexical patterns, syntactic structures, and ideological features related to gender, labour, and protection. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to the methodological development of corpus-based approaches in CLL and shows how CADS can be employed to uncover latent ideological features in legal documents. The approach is intended as a replicable model for future comparative studies of legal language and invites further research with expanded corpora and refined annotation schemes to deepen the empirical analysis of labour law discourse.