Sociolinguistic Variation of English Legal Terms Denoting Disturbance of the Peace

Abstract

The article focuses on the use of English legal terms denoting disturbance of the peace. The lexico-semantic group of these terms includes 228 elements. Nine of them are used on the whole territory of the United States (breach of the peace, disturbance of the peace, unlawful assembly, rout, riot, hooliganism, police riot, prison riot, student riot) and are defined as general terms. The rest of the terms (219) are used only on the territory of one state or on the territory of several states at the same time. These terms make up the majority of English legal terms denoting disturbance of the peace, and are referred to as regional terms. They appeared due to the ability of different states to create their own laws and due to the American common law system, which relies on court precedents as a source of law. One more reason for their appearance was the difference in the historical development of legal systems on the territories of different states. Regional terms denoting disturbance of the peace are divided into criminally specific and verbally specific. The group of criminally specific regional terms includes those that have no counterparts with the same meaning among general or other regional terms. These criminally specific regional terms are subdivided into those used only on the territory of one state and those used on the territory of several states. There are 142 criminally specific terms used only on the territory of one state and 5 criminally specific terms used on the territory of several states. The second group of regional terms includes verbally specific terms which have the same meaning as other general or regional terms denoting disturbance of the peace. Verbally specific terms are subdivided into those that have counterparts among terms used on the whole territory of the USA and those that have counterparts among other regional terms. There are 14 verbally specific terms that have counterparts among those used on the whole territory of the USA and 58 ones that have counterparts among other regional terms. Criminally specific terms used on the territory of only one state make up the majority of the terms in the lexico-semantic group of English legal terms denoting disturbance of the peace due to extra linguistic factors, which include the specific nature of the US law and the change in the knowledge about different kinds of disturbance of the peace in different US states.