Morphosyntactic and semantic behaviour of legal phraseological units

Abstract This paper analyses the morphosyntactic and semantic behaviour of a sample of verb-noun constructions (VNCs, Tabares Plasencia 2012) from the corpus CRIMO (Hourani Martin and Tabares Plasencia 2016), a specialised comparable corpus of different varieties of Spanish that comprises the legislation on criminal law and criminal procedure from the Hispanic states. Our analysis revealed that topolectal variation is common despite attempts by international organisations to harmonise the terminology used in this legal subdomain. It will also be demonstrated that transformations of VNCs are pragmatically motivated and conditioned by the context. Examining these transformations reveals conventions of specialised discourse and textual genre which is why their representation in terminographical tools should be considered as they are an important means for a translator to achieve the adequacy and naturalness required for legal translation.