Contrastive analysis of constitutional one-word terms in Lithuanian, Russian and English

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present the results of the contrastive word-formation analysis of one-word terms of the Lithuanian, Russian and English constitutional law. The terms were collected from the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania (1992), the Constitution of the Russian Federation (1993) and major UK legal acts of constitutional nature translated into Modern English, namely Magna Carta (1297), Habeas Corpus Act (1679), the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1700), including the amendments as in force today, and the original text of the Human Rights Act (1998). The investigated terms are formed in the languages which belong to three different branches of the Indo-European language family (a Baltic, an East Slavic and a West Germanic) and are used in three different legal systems with different term formation traditions. These differences determine the peculiarities of their formal structure which the authors seek to reveal. The article describes the term formation patterns and their frequency, as well as the general tendencies of one-word term formation in the investigated languages. The research is based on the principles of synchronic word formation analysis, the descriptive-contrastive analysis and the quantitative analysis of the collected data. The findings of the contrastive analysis are expected to be useful for the development of legal terminology of Lithuania, Russia and other countries.