FTAs offer several advantages to the countries that enter into this kind of agreements. In 1776, the Scottish economist Adam Smith published his famous book The Wealth of Nations, where he advocated the advantages of economic liberty where free trade was an important component (Irwin, 2009). According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, trade liberalization and tariff reductions allow countries abiding by these agreements to engage in business with the other parties with less restrictions (APEC Study Centre, 2001).32 This way, countries can expand their access to other markets and thereby produce and export more goods instead of relying solely on the national market, with its inherent limitations. This in turn can generate additional jobs or at least absorb the jobs lost in other economic sectors that are affected by the implementation of FTAs. Besides, countries abiding by FTAs can in theory optimize their economy by specializing their production. As a consequence, they are able to focus their export efforts on the economic sectors in which they have a relative strength compared to other countries.
In contrast, critics of FTAs point to the fact that jobs are lost in some economic sectors where a country does not have a relatively stronger position compared to another country. When a country has to abide by a FTA, its economy becomes more dependent on trade partners. Thus, it can be affected by the economic fluctuations of another economy that receives its exports.
In the last two decades, many developing countries have been entering into
32http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/aus us fta mon/
FTAs with developed countries (Crump, 2007). This way, developing coun-tries, which typically export commodities and raw materials, gain access to trade with markets. However, they are also affected by scale economies that produce many goods at a cheaper price, while these raw materials are pro-cessed in developed countries and then the finished products are imported to less developed countries with much higher prices. This added new competi-tion can destroy jobs in the less developed countries, which are condemned to import, with the result that their local industry is progressively diminished.
Developing countries tend to export commodities and raw materials. This is what for a long time happened with Colombian coffee and still happens to a lesser degree. Coffee beans were exported to North America and Europe without any added value and then reimported as a finished product. This way, local farmers would only get a tiny fraction of the total income of the coffee industry, whereas a handful of multinational companies would get hold of the vast majority of wealth. These issues are discussed in detail in Graham (2004) and Irwin (2009).
This chapter has offered a description of the institutions that regulate world trade policies, the various FTAs that are included in the FTA corpus and has offered a glimpse of the complex geopolitical and economic interests that affect these policies and their implementation.
The following chapter describes how this texts have been integrated into the corpus and the method and materials used to carry out the research using the FTA data.
CHAPTER 4
Material and Methods
4.1 Material
Existing corpora are not always pertinent to address the particular questions that a researcher aims to investigate. As a consequence, when a linguist needs data that fit a very specific and restricted purpose in terms of text genre, time period or content of the data, with restrictions related to a narrow domain or subdomain, the researcher often finds that no corpus is available and necessarily has to build his/her own corpus to fit his/her particular needs.
Thus, because of the particular needs of this project, and since there was no corpus available dealing exclusively with FTA data, it was necessary to first gather texts from several FTAs and then to process the data to compile a parallel corpus with FTA texts.
To carry out the research, test the hypotheses set in Section 1.3 and attain the objectives set in Section 1.4, a specialized parallel corpus with FTA texts in two languages has been compiled. The aim of building the corpus is to study the terms of legal and economic domains in this genre and in particular the specialized collocations that include these terms.
The examples were extracted semi-automatically from a parallel corpus
of English and Spanish official texts from FTAs comprising approximately 1.5 million words in each language (Pati˜no, 2013). These examples reflect the usage of specialized collocations by experts in the subject field of inter-national trade. The content of the corpus will be described further in Section 4.2.2.
Additionally, for contrast purposes, a collection of reference lexical re-sources was also compiled. These lexical rere-sources that were used as refer-ence are composed by four bilingual and two monolingual dictionaries from the specialist domain of economics and a subdomain of economics, namely, international trade. These resources will be described beginning in Section 4.2.4 until Section 4.3.
Two approaches were employed to carry out the research. At the macro level, a corpus-driven approach was used to investigate the frequency and representativeness of the specialized collocations found in these texts, by using tools which employ a combination of both methods, i.e. statistical techniques and linguistic rules. Later, at the micro level, a comparison of specialized collocations from English and Spanish texts found on the FTA corpus was made. Then, an analysis was carried out in order to identify the linguistic clues that these lexical units provide which is useful to establish a domain-specificity. This information can be used to model the metadata and linguistic annotation for processing these lexical units.