Continuous Semasiological Analysis of the Lexical Composition of the Law Text (A Case Study of Article 152 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation)

The article presents a new type of semasiological analysis of the vocabulary that makes up the text of the law. The consideration of lexical units of the legal text allows the authors to interpret them as terms undergoing evolutionary legalization and being at its different stages-from national to special legal. In this vein, a classification of the lexical units according to their degree of originality is developed. The text of the law thus appears as a manifestation of "frozen diachrony". The lexicon of Article 152 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation is the empirical basis and the case of the analysis. Considerable attention is paid to the words and phrases with a low degree of legalization-potential terms ("pre-terms", "half-terms"). The uncertainty of the semantics of national words, polysemantic and non-established terms that occur in the legal document provides for the requests to carry out forensic expert examination of laws and bills. As such, in the study, it is linked with anti-corruption expert examination. The need for it arises due to controversial situations in which one of the corruptogenic factors is recognized as legal and linguistic uncertainty. The main causes of semantic uncertainty in the article are such manifestations of natural language as discursive functioning of vocabulary, leading to the splitting of word meanings (polysemy) and synonymy. The article opens with the analysis of the scientific legal-linguistic context, which includes a new type of continuous analysis of the lexicon of the legal document. It is formed by the discussion of the problem of ambiguous, uncertain semantics of lexemes (called "pre-terms") included in legislative texts. The main part of the article actualizes the classification of the lexical units of Article 152 in accordance with the degree of their legalization. The scheme is formed by the following sections: "modal words and connectors of public use"; "near-legal lexemes"; "pre-terminological lexemes and phrases" (this group consists of lexemes presented in the legal literature, but lacking an unambiguous definition); "pure legal lexemes and phrases"; "legalized proper names" (nomenclature vocabulary). The semantics of the synonymous group "honor, dignity, business reputation and a good name" is described in more detail. The discursive semantic senses of each of these lexemes extracted from different discourses are analyzed: artistic, poetic, journalistic, legal, and other types of discourses. In the concluding part of the article, the authors consider the prospects of application of the proposed analysis in relation to the perlocative examination of legal documents and bills aimed at identifying their accessibility, level and quality of understanding.

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