Semantički izazovi jezika krivičnog prava

Abstract

The language of law, as well as other professional languages, has specific characteristics at morphosyntactic, pragmatic, and lexical level. The paper analyzes the semantic relations that exist in the French language of law. Legal texts from the field of French criminal law, primarily the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, served as the corpus for our research. One of the goals was to determine whether synonymy, polysemy and homonymy are widespread phenomena in the language of law, bearing in mind that, like any sociolect, the language of law strives for univocity and precision of terms. The analysis showed that all semantic relations that exist in general language are present in the language of law as well. While homonymy is a less common, synonymy is very pronounced, and besides external polysemy, when a word can have one meaning in general language and another in the language of law, there is also internal polysemy, which manifests in a way that a word can have different meanings in different legal subgenres which represents a particular challenge both for the creation, interpretation and application of law as well as for the comparative analysis and translation of legal texts.