The Distinctive Use of Capital Letters in the Catalan Language: An analysis of a corpus of sources on conventions applicable to legal and administrative writing

The Catalan language possesses a significant corpus of work on writing conventions. Our research has concentrated on an analysis of the sources covering conventions on the use of capital letters, conventions that are likely to be emplo­yed in the field of legal and administrative writing. The sources analysed are often directly associated with this type of writing, but we have also studied general reference works and style guides. The results have been classified under the following headings: formal treatments, job titles and dignitaries, the designation of persons outside of formal documen­tation, formally constituted undertakings or bodies, institutions, legal regulations and administrative documentation. Discussion of the results offers some items for discussion after analysis of the corpus: the use of conceptual antono­masia and the application of the principle of semantic singularity as rules for the writing of job titles, the issue of the formal constitution of bodies and undertakings and its repercussions in the use of capital letters, the roles played by exceptions to naming rules (coreferencing, abbreviated or incomplete designations, unifying plurals), the ambiguity of the concept of ‘institution’ and its implications for writing and the differences between sources in terms of the naming of legal instruments.