Horizontal and Vertical Distribution Patterns of Nearly-Synonymous Terms in the Language of Law

Abstract

Lawyers deny the existence of synonyms, but this issue comes to the fore in the legilinguistic considerations when dealing with texts from the perspective of translation. 2Translators frequently encounter the challenge of the system adequate categorisation of hyponymically related terms which -according to the bilingual lexicographic sources consulted for a specific entry -are all target language equivalents of specific English terms. The genre factor is also to be taken into consideration. The research aims at presenting practical guidelines as regards the system inherent principles related to the distribution of semantically related terms. It is assumed that the factors determining the context-specific use of the nearly-synonymous terms are accounted for in the horizontal and vertical perspective by reference to the legal genres and systemic, hierarchical arrangement of the relevant legal provisions respectively. The study is based on authentic materials and the data have been extracted from court files in the domain of commercial law. The corpus consists of parallel texts, i.e. English documents and their Polish translations.