ANALYZING THE CONCEPTS OF “BINOMIAL” AND “DOUBLET” IN THE CONTEXT OF LEGAL ENGLISH STUDIES

Abstract

Background. Legal English is a field of interest to both linguistic and legal scholars. Despite the different purposes of such research, two- and multi-component expressions connected by the conjunctions “and” or “or” are often the subject of such research. Various terms are currently used for these expressions, but the most common are “doublet” and “binomial”. Purpose. Identifying the most appropriate term for naming two- and multi-component expressions in legal English. Materials and methods. Two- and multi-component expressions have been analyzed in terms of morphology, semantics and etymology. The methods of corpus linguistics have been used to check the irreversibility of these expressions. Results. Two- and multi-component expressions used in legal English have the following characteristics. The components of these expressions always belong to the same part of speech and can be in synonymous or complementary relations, as well as correlate as “part and whole”. In terms of components' etymology, the expressions can include words etymologically English or borrowed from one or two languages, or both. The sequence of components in expressions may vary, but one of the variants is always more frequent. The whole complex of the identified characteristics is covered by the concept of “binomial", so it is recommended to use this term.

Keywords

• legal english
• binomial
• doublet
• synonymy
• irreversible expressions