| Keywords [eng] |
Kolokacijos, kolokacinis rezonansas, kaltinamasis, teisės diskursas, kontrastyvinė analizė, collocations, collocational resonance, defendant, accused, legal discourse, contrastive analysis |
| Abstract [eng] |
Many scholars regard individual words as the main units of meaning, however, their definitions are often too vague and do not account for the multiplicity of the shades of meaning a particular word may have, therefore, it seems that meaning is not concentrated in an individual word, but rather in its environment on the whole (Sinclair 1996). The purpose of the study was to analyse the collocational resonance of references to the presumably guilty parties: the Lithuanian noun kaltinamasis 'the accused' and its two English correspondences, i.e. accused and defendant, in legal and general discourses as evidenced through their strongest noun and verb collocates. The data of the study consisted of three legal sources, namely, the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Republic of Lithuania, Criminal Code of Canada and Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure of the United States, as well as three general corpora of Lithuanian and English, i.e. Lithuanian Web 2014, Canadian domain of English Web 2020 and US domain of English Web 2020. Kaltinamasis was analysed in the Lithuanian sources, accused – in the Canadian sources, defendant – in the American sources. In order to analyse the data, a contrastive analysis of collocational profiles was performed by adopting the collocational resonance approach proposed by Williams and Millon (2009). The results of this study suggest that the morphological and semantic features of the three lexemes accurately reflect their collocational environment. The conceptualisation of defendant as someone who needs defending seems to be true because the collocational resonance of defendant is the most positive out of the three examined lexemes in both legal and general discourses. Defendant can be regarded as the most active participant to the proceedings who makes his/her presence felt by exercising the rights granted to him/her and trying to do everything to defend himself/herself. Moreover, the perception of kaltinamasis and accused as the wrongdoers is also supported by the fact that their collocational resonance for the most part is rather negative in legal discourse and remains so in general discourse. It has been found that kaltinamasis and accused mainly deny or admit their guilt and seemingly do not put that much effort to defend themselves, which may lead to believe that they are actually guilty of committing an offence. The research data shows how a legal term which acquires a certain resonance affects the attitude of both other participants to the proceedings and external observers of the proceedings towards the accused party. Such insights may be important for further terminological work and training of legal professionals. In the future, this study could be extended to include more legal texts and functional collocates. |
