The article provides a contrastive analysis of 54 multiword terms of the EU legal acts in the Lithuanian and French languages and discusses the principles of multiword term formation in the investigated languages. Firstly, the theoretical principles of the analysis (conception of a term and the phenomenon of valency) are defined. Secondly, the main syntactic structures of the analysed multiword terms are presented indicating the head of the phrase, the types of its dependants and their government structure. Afterwards, the semantic and grammatical peculiarities of the noun-dependants and the adjective-dependants are discussed. The analysis reveals structural similarities and differences of the multiword terms of the EU legal acts in Lithuanian and French and provides insights on multiword term formation in the investigated languages. The results of the analysis are believed to be valuable both for term developers and translators, as well as users and learners of legal Lithuanian and French.

Šiame straipsnyje autorės nori parodyti gretinamosios terminų analizės galimybes tiriant sutarčių teisės terminus. Pirmiausia, siekiama gretinamosios analizės pagalba išanalizuoti terminus anglų, vokiečių ir lietuvių kalbose. Antra, norima parodyti sutarčių specifinius elementus ir struktūrinius panašumus. Trečia, naudojantis gretinamąja analize, surandami angliškiems adekvatūs vokiški ir lietuviški terminai. Pabaigai, pateikiami rezultatai ir išvados apie atliktą analizę. Šis straipsnis parodo, kokiu būdu galima analizuoti terminus sutartyse. Pateiktas gretinamasis metodas ir trumpa kelių terminų analizė atskleidžia specifinius terminų aspektus. Toks metodas ir analizė gali būti naudingi vertėjams, terminologams bei tiems, kurie mokosi teisės kalbos.

The aim of the article is to present the results of the contrastive word-formation analysis of one-word terms of the Lithuanian, Russian and English constitutional law. The terms were collected from the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania (1992), the Constitution of the Russian Federation (1993) and major UK legal acts of constitutional nature translated into Modern English, namely Magna Carta (1297), Habeas Corpus Act (1679), the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1700), including the amendments as in force today, and the original text of the Human Rights Act (1998). The investigated terms are formed in the languages which belong to three different branches of the Indo-European language family (a Baltic, an East Slavic and a West Germanic) and are used in three different legal systems with different term formation traditions. These differences determine the peculiarities of their formal structure which the authors seek to reveal. The article describes the term formation patterns and their frequency, as well as the general tendencies of one-word term formation in the investigated languages. The research is based on the principles of synchronic word formation analysis, the descriptive-contrastive analysis and the quantitative analysis of the collected data. The findings of the contrastive analysis are expected to be useful for the development of legal terminology of Lithuania, Russia and other countries.

The article deals with contrastive word-formation analysis of Lithuanian and English one-word terms of the constitutional law. The terms were collected from the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania (1992) and two major UK legal acts of constitutional nature translated into Modern English, namely Magna Carta (1215) and The Act of Settlement (1700) including the amendments as in force today. The research seeks to reveal how constitutional one-word terms are formed in the Lithuanian and the UK legal systems, to highlight peculiarities of term-formation in Lithuanian and English and to get insight into the most important regularities characteristic of the analysed languages. The research has been conducted using the general principles of synchronic word formation analysis, the descriptive-contrastive analysis and the quantitative analysis of the collected Lithuanian and English data. The results of the research reveal that the distribution of the formal patterns of the analysed terms is different in the investigated languages as well as the means of word-formation and frequency thereof. The results of the research are expected to provide ideas and information to the developers and researchers of legal terminology of Lithuania and other countries.