A Contrastive Study Of Legal Terminology Between Chinese And Korean

In the legal lexical system, legal terms play an important role. Without the existence of legal terms, there are no laws & regulations, let alone law-enforcement. So the study of Legal terms will be a significant contribution to forensic linguistics development.On the basis of reviewing two countries'legal terms, taking Chinese-Korean legal terms as the object of study, Honji and Hansa (Chinese character) in Chinese-Korean legal terms as the corpus of study, descriptive linguistics and contrastive linguistics as the theory guideline, also applying the qualitative and quantitative combination methods, this paper contrasts word-formation, lexical meaning change, and lexical meaning relations in Chinese and Korean legal terms from two aspects of lexical morphology and lexical meaning.This paper is divided into four sections. In the first section, it reviewed the study of the legal terms, and clarified its purpose and significance.In the second section, firstly, it defined Chinese and Korean legal terms. According to its definition, it categorized legal terms into three parts in terms of subjects, scope of application, origin.In the third section, in terms of establishing a contrastive platform between Chinese and Korean legal terms, this paper comparatively analyzes their word formations. And two legal terms use three types of word-formation:compounding, derivation, abbreviation. Compounding legal terms apply a complex word-formation, namely, combined type, modifier-head, subject-predicate type, verb-object type, verb comple-ment type, etc. In Chinese and Korean legal terms, there are both prefixes and suffixes derivational word-formations. But there exists a big contrast in abbreviation contrast between Chinese and Korean legal terms. Abbreviations in Chinese legal terms meet concise and economic requirements, on the contrary, these in Korean legal term are underdeveloped, because of Korean language agglutinative.In the fourth section, it contrastively analyzes the meaning of Chinese and Korean legal terms. Three types of meaning change are narrow, expand, and transfer. Because of singularity in legal terms, narrow type or transfer type is popularly surveyed in meaning change of legal terms. In order to find out an equivalent legal terms in two languages, lexical meaning relations such as hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy are contrastively analyzed in this paper.