Linguistic aspects of law: problems and prospects

The article is devoted to the theoretical analysis of the scientific work on the problems of linguistic features of the legal language arising at the intersection of language and law. The current problems arising from the above interaction in the state, socio-legal, professional and private spheres have been described, the issues of debate have been outlined and the need for a comprehensive approach to their further study has been substantiated. The purpose of the article is to summarise the scientific investigations carried out in the “language and law” coordinate system and to identify specific linguistic problems related to the legal language and the ways of their solution. Nowadays, modern legal linguistics has faced an acute issue of developing a special methodology which should take into account both natural language, legal linguistic and legal aspects. The article uses the method of analysis of theoretical sources relevant to the research topic, which involves the collection and extraction of scientific information belonging to the group of empirical methods of scientific knowledge, as well as processing and analysis of the data obtained, which belongs to the methods of theoretical knowledge. On the basis of a systematic analysis, the linguistic and legal research on the problem has been reviewed; the main vectors of domestic and foreign jurisprudence development with a projection on the linguistics of law have been identified; the issues of streamlining legal terminology, searching for interlingual equivalents and creating dictionaries of legal terms have been considered; the problems of combining theoretical and applied methods for qualitative linguistic examination of legal texts have been characterised; the positive and negative consequences of semantic and textual linguistic examinations of legal texts have been studied. The article discusses the debatable approaches to semantic and textual examination of legal texts, its positive and negative consequences, and substantiates the need to expand the subject area in order to create a single modern research space in the coordinate system “language and law”