To the Thesis on the Systemic Nature of an English Term – Illustrated Through the Criminal Law Terminology (original) (raw)

Recently, the number of terminological research has increased significantly; it refers to research of both natural sciences and humanities terminology. The latter should include the English criminal law terminology considered in this work. One of the major reasons for this phenomenon can be identified as the need of any country in training highly qualified employees who, along with deep knowledge of their profession, would be able to work in the global environment and therefore be proficient in the foreign languages, which also means knowledge of professional terminology in these languages. However, despite the fact that a growing number of studies has been recently done on various issues of terminology, including the systemic nature of terms in various sciences, the English terminology of criminal law has not been sufficiently studied, which creates a considerable scope for the research. This paper considers the thesis on the systemic nature of these terms through studying the following phenomena: interdetermination of terms, realization of genus-species relations, synonymic and antonymic relations. As the result of the analysis it was discovered that well developed genus-species relations of criminal law terms, as well as the developed synonymy in this terminology and clearly defined relations of the opposites confirm the thesis of the systemic structure of the of terminology. It is also noted that a synonymic chain may have a certain length, and the antonymic relations are expressed in lexis and morphology. More over, the work analyzes one more specific feature of this terminological system – multiple meaning of a term which is considered by some researches to be the negative linguistic phenomenon. The author reviews the researches on this issue and draws the main conclusions on the number of multiple meaning and monosemantic terms.