Lexical features of the modern English discourse of the law enforcement system

This paper presents the results of a study of terminological units and discourse formulas which constitute the lexical basis of the discourse of the English law enforcement system. Due to the current expanding cooperation of Russian law enforcement units with their foreign partners the area addressed is of great interest to those involved in teaching foreign languages for specific purposes at law faculties and schools, yet has not received an adequate treatment to this point. The article reveals an interdisciplinary character of the law enforcement terminology, which accounts for numerous transterms used in it. The study identifies the reasons for the integration of the law enforcement terminology with other terminological systems and also names the main sources of transterms. Other highly productive methods of concept nomination in the area include syntactic and morphosyntactic term formation. This enriches the law enforcement terminology with multicomponent terms and their abbreviated and elliptical variants. The analysis of discourse formulas suggests syntactic heterogeneity of these structures, their stylistic neutrality, monosemy and semantic transparency. This layer of the law enforcement discourse is also characterized by information compression by means of abbreviations and digital encoding. The results of the research can be applied in English textbook and translation dictionary designing.