Evolutional legal system of vocabulary: theoretical and methodological aspects

The article discloses the issue of gradual terminological formation of national vocabulary in legal documents. The material for the study was the words and phrases from Article 152 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation “Protection of the honor, dignityand business reputation of citizens”. The investigation of national vocabulary units has enabled to prove that though being incorporated into latest Russian legal texts, they are still deprived of pure terminological status. Having discovered the lack of vocabulary homogeneity, the authors singled out the degrees of legal-term applicability for the texts under study and introduced authentic typology, distinguishing the range of items from national language bulk to special judicial terms. Thus, legal terms are both specialized linguistic units and language units that preserve in their genetic code its national properties: polysemy, variabilityand potential dynamics, irreducibility to one single meaning. The studyshows that legal-term applicability terminologycorrelates with the stages of evolution in national vocabulary. This assumption is exemplified bythe analysis of the words with the same root morpheme chest- with the focus on their semantic development. The synchronous studyoflegal-term applicability requires elaboration of the method of legal text continuous sampling, which is ofapplied value for linguistic expertise of judicial texts.