Structural and semantic features of legal vocabulary in an English animated film for children

Aim. To study legal terminological vocabulary in the text of an English-language children’s animated film. The purpose of this work is to describe and analyze the semantic, stylistic and structural characteristics of legal terms used in the English-language children’s film discourse.

Methodology. The material for the study was more than 3,000 legal terminological units selected by a continuous sampling method from about 50 highly rated animated films and series according to the IMDb website. On the basis of lexical and semantic, contextual, structural, component and frequency analysis, the most typical characteristics of special vocabulary providing semantic mobility of a legal term in the studied discourse were identified, the distribution of terminological units by age groups was calculated depending on their semantic component specialization degree.

Results. The classification proposed by the authors reflects both the structural composition of legal terms and their semantic characteristics, which makes it possible to correlate the lexical units encountered in the context of a children’s animated film with certain lexical-semantic fields of the sublanguage of jurisprudence.

Research implications. Theoretical application of this work lies in the fact that the generalized results of the study can serve to expand the understanding of the semantic significance of legal terminology outside legal discourse. The data obtained can be useful for further study of the pragmatic potential and features of the functioning of special vocabulary in children’s film text. Practical application is determined by wide possibilities of using the analyzed examples in textbooks and materials for teaching a professionally oriented foreign language.

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