Main types of definitions in legal texts

Abstract

The article contributes to examining different methods for defining legal terms, their effectiveness depending on the task of defining and specificity for international normative legal acts. The author determines correlation of definitions in interpretational blocks of international normative legal acts and states that the degree of concretization of terms in legal texts is predetermined by the addressee factor and his intended cognitive base. The interpretation component of the international normative legal act (INLA) is represented by special interpretation blocks whose boundaries coincide with the boundaries of entire sections and parts, as well as separate interpretations in other sections and articles of the INLA that allow to specify the meanings of certain terms or provisions of these sections and articles.Research has shown that the interpretive elements can be in total from 35% to 50% of the text, which indicates their significant role in the informationinterpretation space of the international normative legal act in general and in the informationinterpretation space of the addressee in particular. The main elements of the interpretation blocks are the definitions of terms and term combinations. The structural definitions in INLA differ in many respects from the definitions of explanatory dictionaries. In contrast to the latter, these definitions are predominantly polystructural in nature: they represent most often complete predicative structures with the verbs of equivalent relation. Reference definitions are definitions in which the definiendum (defined) takes a preposition in relation to the definiens (defining), while the correlate is represented by the verb of identity (equivalence). In other words, these are direct, expanded definitions with an equalizer, and the definiens is semantically significant. Such definitions are quantified in INLA, since they meet the requirements of the most accurate, unambiguous interpretation.