Comparative Socio-Political Processes and Their Reflection in Legal Linguistics in English and French

Abstract

There is a close relationship between linguistics and law, and one of these links can be legal stylistics, which is clearly needed in research. By analogy, legal linguistics is a science that monitors the performance of all branches of linguistics such as phonetics in identifying identity, techniques of writing legal texts, semantics, analysis of words and text, in law-related purposes in judicial courts. The scope of legal linguistics research is linguistic knowledge on the one hand and the needs of legal and legal societies such as courts on the other hand. This article is devoted to a very relevant topic – socio-political processes and their reflection in English and French languages and especially how new words indicate these changes. The research is made on the basis of the list of new words that were fixed in the Oxford dictionary and Petit Larousse in 2020. Neologisms were analyzed according to the reality they denote and types of language units they belong to. Special attention was paid to the new words belonging to medicine and coronovirus area as 2020 was remarkable for giving birth to a big amount of new words of this group. In addition each language acquired a lot of words connected with the changes of people’s lifestyle caused by coronovirus restriction and the new rules of life. The research showed that both languages, English and French, are very sensitive to changes happening in each society. Neologisms reveal these changes and show the areas of society that has undergone the biggest transformations in a particular period of time.