Lietuvių, anglų ir norvegų kalbų baudžiamosios teisės terminai
Criminal Law Terms in Lithuanian, Norwegian and English

Summary/Abstract: The article provides a comparative analysis of criminal law terms denoting criminal activities in the Lithuanian, English and Norwegian languages and discusses the principles of term-formation used in the languages under investigation. The research findings lead to the following conclusions: 1) Criminal activities in the investigated languages are denoted by one-word and multi-word terms. In Lithuanian, most one-word terms are verbal derivatives, in English – verbal derivatives or root-nouns, while in Norwegian, one-word terms are mostly compounds. The number of words constituting the multi-word terms is different in these languages as well. Short terms (consisting of 1-3 words) prevail in English and Norwegian, whereas in Lithuanian, alongside with the short terms, long and complicated phrases (consisting of 6 and more words) are used as names of criminal activities. 2) The investigated terms have different origin. Most Lithuanian terms are made of inheritances; in English and Norwegian, however, a considerable number of terms is made of borrowings from French (in English) and German (in Norwegian). 3) Though the analysed terms denote the same or similar criminal activities, the semantics of the constitutive components of the Lithuanian, English and Norwegian counterparts is often different. This proves that the terms reflect not only the nature of the activity, but also the attitude to the activity in different societies. 4) All three languages possess terms made of figurative words which expressively connect the crimes with day-to-day activities and historic events. Most of such terms are found English. The offered insights on the different nature of the criminal law terms are believed to be valuable in considering the principles of term-formation and teaching/learning/translating legal Lithuanian, English and Norwegian.

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