Towards a Cognitive Linguistics Account of a Terminological Database 187Accounting for the terminology and methodology
of the project
In order to prepare the bilingual, terminographic database the author
complied a corpus from which the data were extracted. The corpus is
genre-wise homogenous being made up solely of prescriptive,^3 parallel
legal texts. In particular, the author made use of selected Polish legal acts
regulating specific legal discipline and their translations, as retrieved from
the online application Lex Táumaczenia, published by Wolters Kluwer.^4 At
this stage of the project the data have been retrieved from the following
legal acts: Bankruptcy and Rehabilitation Law, Commercial Companies
Code and part of Civil Code.
The project consisted in extracting data from the parallel texts, i.e. the
Polish terms and their English equivalents, analysing them as to their
semantics in the cognitive spirit and arranging them macro- and
microstructually following some of the cognitive assumptions. Figure 1
below provides a relevant illustration as regards the macrostructural
framework of the database.^5
(^3) Such qualification of the texts making up the corpus is based on the tripartite
distinction of legal texts into prescriptive, descriptive and hybrid texts, the
classification being based, in most general terms, on the level of formality of the
texts, the category of the subject (the author and the recipient of the texts) and the
category of the functions (informative or normative) (Šarþeviü 1997: 11, Biel
2014: 19-22). The said classification of the texts of law has earned alternative
nomenclature. For example, WiĊcáawska (2013: 74) distinguishes legislative texts
and lawyer's texts, corresponding to prescriptive and descriptive legal texts
respectively. Notably, this classification is also recognised in the theory of law
(Seidler, Groszyk, Malarczyk, PieniąĪek 2001, Chauvin, Stawecki, Winczorek
2014).
(^4) The author is aware of the unauthoritative – in the sense accepted by Baaij (2012:
10), Jopek-Bosiacka (2007: 13), Šarþeviü (1997:20) and WiĊcáawska (2014) –
character of the English parallel texts and the RLT should not be treated as the only
legitimate source of terminological reference making up the corpus. Yet, it remains
a fact that the corpus in general constitutes coherent and contextwise systematic
pairings of the legal terms and it possesses a certain level of official character
(Šarþeviü 1997: 20).
(^5) To meet the editorial requirements of the publisher the Figures included in the
foregoing need to be presented as patchwork elements. It is accepted throughout
the paper that the element in the highlighted frame is the end column which relates
to the entries in the first column, the middle sections being removed for reasons of
space and relevance.