Structurally inseparable nominative units in English-language judicial discourse: a structural-semantic aspect

The study aims to identify the structural-semantic characteristics of structurally inseparable nominative units in English-language judicial discourse. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that, through the application of a comprehensive approach to the corpus, the study for the first time reveals the structural-semantic distinctiveness of one-word lexical items belonging to different parts of speech in English-language judicial discourse. That is, it determines word-formation processes, characterizes the principal word-formation models, and gives a detailed description and analysis of structurally inseparable nominative units specifically from the perspectives of structure and semantics. As a result of the research, it was established that affixal words predominate over compounds, with a prevailing distribution of suffixed nouns bearing agentive suffixes and suffixes denoting abstract concepts, formed from verbal motivating bases and denoting basic concepts of the judicial sphere. A fairly wide distribution was noted of adjectives formed from verbal and nominal bases through suffixation and prefixation, as well as of prefixed and suffixed verbs of business and professional thematic areas with substantival and adjectival motivating bases. Semantically dense compound nouns are most often formed according to a non-prepositional model and from verbs with postpositional elements by means of conversion (zero-derivation); complex adjectives and verbs are underrepresented in the studied material due to their more cumbersome structure.