Formation of criminal law terms in English, Lithuanian and Norwegian

Abstract

The paper deals with a detailed analysis of 20 legal terms commonly used in different categories of criminal law in English and their equivalents in Lithuanian and Norwegian languages. The legal terms were selected from the Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the Penal Code of the Republic of Lithuania and the Criminal Law Acts of the Kingdom of Norway. In addition to those sources, several monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of legal terms were used. The investigated terms differ in two important aspects – they are formed in three different Indo-European languages (a West Germanic, a Baltic and a North Germanic) and they are used in three different legal systems with different law traditions. The research focuses on term formation models and seeks to reveal general tendencies and peculiarities of term formation in each of the investigated languages. The findings of the research are believed to be useful for formation of the new terms and correction/development of currently used ones, the latter being important for term formation in Lithuanian. Teaching/learning/translating legal Lithuanian, English and Norwegian are also the fields of practical application of the research findings.