Monomials in English for law

Abstract

The article presents an overview of English for Law as a language for specific purposes and an experimental approach to classifying and analysing the English legal terms from a footing of algebraic linguistics. It is suggested that Ukrainian for Law may currently be viewed as ‘understudied’ language for specific purposes as opposed to English for Law. At first, the paper presents a general overview of (i) languages for specific purposes and (ii) monomials in linguistics in the light of the term definitions. Then, the research introduces certain structural features of monomials in the legal terminology as exemplified in the English language. The underlying basis refers to the similarities found between an algebraic expression, its components and operations, and a terminological set expression in English for Law as a language for specific purposes. These days skyrocketing development of information technologies and focus on cross-cultural communication in the professional domain require fresh innovative views on the study, with an emphasis on the interdisciplinary. Finally, in everyday interaction experts in law as well as lay-people may hear syntactical patterns of legal terms that arrange in clusters / word combinations, which most frequently consist of two-, three- and multi-components in both English and Ukrainian. The suggested classification may shed some light on to the syntactical structures of the English legal terms, on the one hand, and on the other, it may develop in near future in some distinct product for computer-aided linguistics.