The general names in the Brazilian legal order

Abstract

This article intends to analyze the presence of general names, such as pessoa, coisa and negócio in the Brazilian legal order. The theoretical support for the general names is grounded on the studies of Halliday and Hasan (1995 [1976]), Mahlberb (2005) and Mihatsch (2006a). Regarding the judicial norms, the concepts of Bobbio (2008) and Bobbio (2011) are adopted. The corpus is formed by articles of the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil (1988) and the Brazilian Civil Code (2002). The analysis of the semantic features reveals that, unlike the association usually made between general names and the informal speech, the items investigated are extremely important for the writing of laws. This fact is explained by its characteristic of having very generic semantic features and by the need of abstraction that exists in the composing the rules.

Keywords

• nomes gerais
• traços semânticos
• ordenamento jurídico