THE TERMINOLOGY OF OFFENCES IN ENGLISH LAW: HOMICIDE

Abstract

"Criminal law is a branch of law which provides the definition of crimes and establishes penalties for convicted offenders. Out of the vast criminal law terminology, which includes the terminology of offences, we have selected the term homicide in order to analyse it from a linguistic (etymological, lexico-semantic, functional) and legal perspective. The modern tendency is to refer to crimes as offences. We will start our analysis from a classification of offences in English law because the legal content of these offences and the relations they have within a taxonomical organisation enable us to establish, linguistically, relations of hyponymy, synonymy, polysemy, etc. The hyperonym of all wrongs under criminal law is the term offence (or crime) and all crimes share the element of injury to the public, harm to society as a whole. In English law there is no offence called homicide, but this umbrella term refers to the killing of a human being. The law identifies certain unlawful or unjustifiable or inexcusable homicides such as murder, manslaughter, infanticide, whereas lawful homicide, also termed justifiable homicide, implies the causing of death in the attempt to prevent a crime, arrest an offender, in self-defence, etc."